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Ethereum Scam Database (etherscamdb.info)
93 points by discombobulate on Aug 4, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments


IMO, the homepage should basically be this page:

https://etherscamdb.info/scams/

But with a little more info text at the top. That way people get to see what the etherscamdb is straight away.


The page button is also confusing. It says "Active Scams" while listing many of them as offline. There is no way to filter the list.


I'd also like to see more grouping and ways to drill down into the data, because inactive MyEtherWallet phishing scams seem to eat up most of the listings and I'm sure people would like to see more than that.


Also it should probably be sorted by status.


I agree. I got deja-vu of a 90s-style "click here to enter my site!" from that landing page.


I shared the link to friends as this URL.


So far it's basically a listing of scam sites trying to masquerade myetherwallet.com. It's like 20 pages deep for just for that. I was thinking it would be something more akin to: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03779.pdf


Why is the first thing on the frontpage about the site being open source? Why dont it start with the true value of the database?


Possibly to invite PRs on Github. As others have mentioned here, the scam listing is in need of some refinement, both in terms of UX and actual data.


Interesting, this could be like an RBL for Ethereum addresses, instead of ip addresses of spammy mail servers.

If the data were kept current and remained open for other systems to query, it seems like something that could be useful. There should probably be a way to appeal something that is blacklisted in the database just as there is a way to report.


How do phishing scams work in Ethereum? And what makes an ICO fake vs. real?

What prevents someone from listing a "legitimate" Ethereum ICO or whatever?


I wonder if they'll list various "gold-backed" cryptocurrencies, like XAURUM and OneGram, where the essential selling script is "Backed by one gram of gold" and "Growth with every transaction", which are obviously contradictory.


I don't know those two, but Digix has a way which isn't contradictory: there's a token backed by a gram of gold, and another token which distributes dividends from transaction fees on the first token.


Hm... What do the miners get?


Miners get the standard Ethereum transaction fees, payable in ether. The Digix tokens run on top of Ethereum, and the gold-backed token takes a percentage of each transfer; i.e. the Digix fees are paid in gold-backed tokens rather than ether.


I'm not sure whether this is the right site for the job, but it's super important that this kind of resource exists for Ethereum. "Trustlessness" can only go so far since not everyone has the technical knowhow to detect scams for themselves. Getting trusted members of the community and having good transparency/governance on this kind of platform is key for it to take off.


It should be the opposite: ethernotscamdb. In crypto you need to assume everything is a scan until proven innocent.


The database appears to be a bunch of trash / test entries for MyEtherWallet.


Sadly, I think these are real. The scammers are just going after all the misspellings of MEW's domain.


I wondered how many scams there could be, then opened the data.yaml file on Github... wow over 2 thousand!


Should just display a giant asterix.


What about all the ICO's that are just money grabs?




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