Crypto Investing: 5 Red Flags To Watch For

About 19,000 cryptocurrencies are currently operating on dozens of blockchain platforms, according to CNBC. Thousands of them are doomed to follow Luna and TerraUSD into digital oblivion.

Some cryptocurrencies are poorly conceived, poorly received or poorly run — others are outright scams.

With 19,000 options to choose from, even the experts could be forgiven for betting their money on the wrong coin every now and again. To avoid making the same mistake, beware of these classic crypto warning signs.

Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto remains anonymous to this day. All of that mystery built up Bitcoin’s early mythology and fueled the rise of cryptocurrency through the 2010s — but just because it worked for the creator doesn’t mean it will work for your digital wallet.

Sometimes, people who launch new cryptocurrencies choose to remain anonymous, which means you can’t research them, their development team or their past projects.

The danger of investing in coins with shadow leaders was illustrated in 2021 by Squid Game, a scam coin purporting to be based on the wildly popular Netflix series of the same name. According to Gizmodo, the meme coin jumped by 83,000% to $2,861 in just a few days. It quickly crashed to $0 once buyers realized they couldn’t sell or trade it on any exchange. The scammers made off with more than $3 million.

While credible mainstream publications like Fortune, the BBC and CNBC were publishing irresponsible and uncritical stories about the rise of the Squid Game coin, Gizmodo ran this unambiguous headline: “New Squid Game Cryptocurrency Launches as Obvious Scam.”

Something just didn’t look right.

Its Telegram channel was closed to outside comments. Its Twitter account didn’t allow the public to reply to posts. The email address listed on the 3-week-old website didn’t respond to inquiries. The website itself — as well as the whitepaper posted to it — was littered with misspellings and grammatical errors.

Like the Nigerian email scams of old, all the signs were there, but the prospect of 83,000% gains made them invisible.

The crypto crash has put a huge bull’s-eye on Matt Damon’s back. The Oscar-winning actor helped bring crypto into the mainstream when his now-infamous “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial aired during the Super Bowl — but many investors who bought into the celebrity hype now feel duped.

If you had invested $1,000 in Bitcoin when the ad first hit YouTube on Oct. 28, 2021, $375 is all that would have remained by mid-June 2022.

Damon, of course, didn’t cause the crash; but, according to Newsweek, he’s one in a long line of celebrities whose endorsements alone caused cryptocurrencies to artificially inflate. Because crypto trades at such a comparatively low volume, a single word, tweet or hashtag from the likes of Kim Kardashian, Larry David, Elon Musk, Jake Paul, Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton can puff up a coin’s value into a very burstable bubble.

The Squid Game jig was up when “investors” — aka marks — realized that the hottest new coin was a one-way street. Once you bought the cryptocurrency, you could never turn it back into real money again because it wasn’t listed for trading on any exchange.

Coinbase and the other big, credible exchanges have strict criteria for listing digital assets. If some preliminary searching reveals that a coin you’re considering is hard to buy on the exchanges you normally use, proceed with caution.

If you’re on the fence about a coin with lots of potential but anonymous leadership, a sketchy website and no home on your regular exchange, the next step is to run it through Token Sniffer. Token Sniffer is a database of scams, frauds and false cryptocurrencies that just don’t smell right and can’t stand up to the kind of critical skepticism that Gizmodo was alone in heaping on the Squid Game coin.

The database is huge and updated every day. Just plug the coin you’re considering into the search bar and Token Sniffer’s analytics tool will pull back the curtain.

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