Lately there were a lot of new ICO's that raised a lot of money. A few examples are Bancor with $153,000,000 and MobileGo with $52,000,000. It looks like this opened a door for scammers that are looking for easy money.
So what do they do?
They create very similiar websites that looks exactly like the original one and spread the links all over and when you send your btc or eth to the address they give you it's gone for ever.
See the 2 examples below.
In the picture below you can see the real Status.im ico site. They looked the same before the ICO ended
In the next picture you see the fake one. Note that still accept contributions even though the ICO is over...
The difference between the 2 domains is that the fake one has a dash instead of a dot. http://contribute-status.im/ instead of https://contribute.status.im/
Same is with Civic that the ICO is currently live. See the real one below https://tokensale.civic.com/
And here is the fake one http://tokensale.civic.us.com/
You can see that they have different numbers.
So how can you know what is the real site?
1)By checking the URL it should be exactly the .com with no strings attached. Or better click on the link from the announcement page on bitcointalk.
2)Check the URL bar it should have a SECURE logo. You can see both fake sites are not secure.
Were you scammed or almost scammed? Please tell us in the comments below.
wow I almost got rekd by the civic one today! jeez good thing I looked further into it!
I'm glad you saved yourself and didn't "invest" in the phishing ICO.
How did Civic scam continue? Once you log in, you have to scan the barcode to the app, which only the real Civic has, right?
I don't know I didn't try it. But I saw someone posting a goo.gl link to that site because he wanted to mask the domain.
Easy come Easy go in this realm