Reddit Removes Fake Trezor Ads Soliciting Orders
Reddit has removed ads impersonating the Trezor shop, the most recent incident of fake bitcoin websites that scam users.
Trezor advertises its bitcoin wallet as a secure home for bitcoin, but that does not prevent scammers from capitalizing on its name for malicious purposes.
The Reddit administrators removed the ads more than 12 hours ago, according to a Reddit post . Reddit readers who notice malicious ads are encouraged to email Reddit at /r/r/reddit.com.
Reddit Users Sent To Fake Site
Reddit users were directed to a cloned version of the Trezor site, according to The Merkle . Any order placed through the fake website would ultimately be lost.
Fake bitcoin ads are among the scams that bitcoin users need to be aware of.
Fake Bitcoin Sites A Problem
This past January, a Reddit user posted his experience being scammed out of some bitcoins after accidentally using a fake website that imitated ShapeShift.io, a cryptocurrency exchange, according to coingecko.com . The fake website looked almost exactly like the actual one, except that it had a missing letter in the URL. ShapeShift.io was notified and posted a blog post about it to warn users.
There were also fake websites for BitStamp, Bitcoin Foundation, Blockchain.info and others, coingecko.com noted. The fake websites make money either by stealing login information from users or misleading users into sending funds. Some even advertise on Google.
Also read: Chinese search giant Baidu stops bitcoin advertising
Baidu Removes All Bitcoin Ads
China’s largest search engine, Baidu, on Thursday removed all bitcoin and virtual currency-related advertising from its online portals on account of cryptocurrency-related Ponzi schemes.
China, the world’s largest market for bitcoin will no longer see bitcoin-related advertising on the country’s most-used search engine, Baidu.
Prominent Chinese exchanges OKCoin and Huobi confirmed the ban to Bloomberg, which claimed that the move was a reaction to the growing number of cryptocurrency-related Ponzi schemes and scams in the country.
Baidu took this measure despite having led a funding round in late June 2016, helping raise $60 million for bitcoin-startup Circle in China. It remains to be seen if the ad-ban extends to established industry companies like Circle.
The website bitcoinscammer.com, which lists bitcoin related scams, has a section for ad network scams that solicit bitcoin payments.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
