Security: Stay alert and beware of Scammers

We all know the world of Crypto can be a bit like the wild west, lower your guard down for a second and you’re face down in the dirt. Today we saw a new attempt by scammers to steal Mina from Wallets.

The method used by these scammers was to send a very small amount of Mina to a large amount of addresses, eg
0.001 Mina. But if you happened to look in the ‘Memo’ field, you would have seen a link to a fake Mina Protocol website offering a free Mina Airdrop.

The fake site is actually only one page, but it looks almost identical to the Mina Protocol website, however if you look carefully in the website address bar you can see it is a different URL. We do not recommend visiting the website for any reason.

There is then a series of instructions where basically they ask you to connect your wallet and then try to steal your seed phrase.

The main thing to remember is that THERE WILL BE NO MINA AIRDROPS, EVER. The tokenisation of the protocol has been very well thought out and the project is progressing at an excellent pace. Mainnet has been live since March and if someone asks for your seed phrase or asks you to connect your wallet in order to get ‘free’ MINA, then it is a scam.

If you are on telegram or discord and someone pretends to be ‘customer support’ and DM’s you out of nowhere, then it is more than likely a scam too. Always be suspicious, double check URL’s and Admin’s. It is easy to spot the genuine ones.

The Mina Community reacted fantastically to the news and we were able to spread the information as fast as we could on social media to keep people on their guards.

There was also quick work from the tech community with both Mina Explorer & Carbonara adding warnings to the account address and the also adding the address to a Mina blacklist.

One good way to keep up to date with any new scam attempts is to join the official Mina Protocol Telegram or Discord Channels. You can find links for them HERE