A number of legitimate charities have been soliciting donations of cryptocurrencies to help the people of Ukraine devastated by the Russian invasion.  Even the Ukrainian government itself has been seeking donations of cryptocurrencies to help purchase military equipment, medical supplies and other necessary items.  Ukraine’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Kuna is accepting donations of bitcoin, ether, tether, litecoin, dogecoin and many other cryptocurrencies.  To date, the Ukrainian government has received 31.5 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency donations.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, scammers are seeing this as an opportunity to scam people seeking to make cryptocurrency donations to help the people of Ukraine.  Scammers posing as Ukrainian officials set up a bogus cryptocurrency called Peaceful World  which they sold on the Uniswap platform.  Charitably inclined people donated more than 50 million dollars before the phony cryptocurrency was unmasked as a scam and, even then, people still poured money into the phony cryptocurrency.

TIPS

Every legitimate cryptocurrency publishes a whitepaper that goes into detail as to all of the underlying fundamentals and technologies involved in the blockchain backing the particular cryptocurrency.  Among the important details are the token name, creator address and contract source code.  If all of that appears baffling to you, you probably shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies because no one should ever invest in something they do not fully understand.

Also, thoroughly investigate the people and company that create the particular cryptocurrency, looking into their background, experience and activities before putting your money into any cryptocurrency.

For those of you receiving the Scam of the day through an email, I just want to remind you that if you want to see the ever increasing list of Coronavirus scams go to the first page of the http://www.scamicide.com website and click on the tab at the top of the page that indicates “Coronavirus Scams.”  Scamicide has been cited by the New York Times as one of three top sources for information about Coronavirus related scams.

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and type in your email address where it states “Sign up for this blog.”