Input Output Global (IOG) CEO Charles Hoskinson sends out a warning to all Cardano users as scammers ramp up their efforts in the countdown to Alonzo’s release.
The highly anticipated Alonzo phase is nearing completion, with September 12 penciled in for the hard fork event to occur. Currently, IOG is working on the process of onboarding third parties to finalize the process.
Once complete, the Cardano chain will feature fully functioning smart contract capability. But more importantly, this milestone moment will put it on equal footing to compete with the likes of Ethereum and Polkadot, to name a few.
As the Alonzo rollout fast approaches, ADA has been making new all-time high after new all-time high. In response, scammers have flocked to the network in the hopes of catching a slice of the action.
Cardano Goes On A Tear
The Elon/China FUD hit peak fear as Bitcoin fell to $29,000. But now, that incident, and the wider FUD picture, seem like a distant memory.
During that period, Cardano peaked at an ATH of $2.50 but then suffered a 60% price drop over three days as the FUD took hold.
Since then, having established a support level at around $0.99, it continued to consolidate over a two-month period. It wasn’t until mid-July that bulls took control, driving huge gains and knocking Binance Coin from the third spot on CoinMarketCap in the process.
Late Monday evening saw ADA hit $3.00, marking a new all-time high. A wider market dip today, plus profit-taking, see bears step in to wrestle control, triggering a 6% swing to the downside at the time of writing.
Nonetheless, YTD gains show overperformance, coming in at +1,500% gains.
Hoskinson Warns Users To Be On Guard
With that, Hoskinson felt it necessary to sound the alarm on scammers looking to exploit Cardano users, saying there’s a positive correlation between price appreciation and scam activity.
“Anytime you see major events coming, and large scale price appreciation, and a lot of volatility, you will always see an enormous increase in scams.”
Last week, Hoskinson posted a video about giveaway scams, which have ballooned in frequency since the price of ADA took off. By Hoskinson’s estimation, they have increased by a factor of ten in recent weeks. Sadly, as these occur on YouTube, which seemingly fails to act in shutting them down, little can be done to nip the problem in the bud.
Similarly, as Alonzo readies launch, Hoskinson spoke of fake app scams, which manipulate users into downloading fake wallets and apps on the premise of upgrading to Alonzo. Typically, funds are stolen once users enter their passphrase into the app.
“There’s going to be a lot of scams around people’s lack of understanding about how upgrades work. So we’ve seen several fake copies of Daedalus, and several fake Cardano applications on the Google Playstore…”
As he has done on many occasions, Hoskinson reiterated that IOG, its partner organizations, and representatives don’t ask for passphrases or private keys. Nor do they ask to install monitoring software to help with technical issues.
Shutting down scammers requires crypto users to step up collectively to the responsibility of “being their own bank.”