hi this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado the scenery is a little bit different because there's some construction in the office and so i'm in a different area got the eagle behind me a nice little water feature although i turned it off for the uh for the video and i hope you guys can hear me all right i'm actually on a laptop instead of my usual computer actually right now rebuilding that computer it's gonna be a lot of fun so i decided to make a quick video at the request of the ambassadors of cardano we've seen a huge increase in uh giveaway scams pump and dump scams and other things and so they wanted me to uh to make a kind of an fyi uh yeah kind of a public service announcement uh to basically discuss some things uh in particular i've been in the cryptocurrency space for almost a decade now and what happens is we see a cyclic uh scam occur where groups of people come they either on telegram or reddit or some forum uh will systematically go and try to increase the price of a particular cryptocurrency usually a smaller cryptocurrency lower volume low cap there's a quick 1015x that's made the people who organize this they basically bought early so it's usually something that they pre-buy before they do the surge and then they have their first money out and the people who end up getting hurt or a lot of retail investors now we saw this done with gamestop we also saw this done with dogecoin and there may be some organized activity for xrp and of course people do this across the cryptocurrency space and so uh as a psa uh in times of high spikes lots of volatility and other such things it is a really really really really good idea for you to exercise extreme caution and due diligence uh sustainable things generally don't go up 500 percent in a day because they often collapse 500 in the day and you're going to be the one who is left with the bag in your hand and those who try to manipulate this it's a game for them they make a lot of money so be very very cautious about being dragged into investment groups or getting special tips about certain things happening or some event occurring and everybody's going to get rich these are not sustainable they're not stable and generally speaking you're going to lose your money if you participate in them so that's the psa on the pump and dump side we've also seen a higher than normal incident and giveaway scams so to describe that the giveaway scam is basically where a video of me or a prominent person in the space like vitalik or elon musk or you know pick your favorite figure some public announcement or video they've done is taken and then usually overlaid with a screen that says hey we're doing a giveaway there's a qr code and they say somehow if you send money we'll send it back and you'll make a lot of money those are always scams unfortunately people still fall for them uh there's currently two lawsuits uh ripple is suing youtube and uh steve wozniak the co-founder of apple is also suing youtube because both cases they have been dragged into these giveaway scams they're often done of me and usually what ends up happening is a person's channel will be hacked because their security wasn't so good all their videos will be erased the channel will be converted over to an official cardano channel and then they upload videos of me and i can't tell you how many people have come to my youtube page complaining that i've hacked their channel so that's also a scam uh it's called a giveaway scam so you have pump and dump scams giveaway scam and then finally impersonation scams where people will impersonate me or a cardano ambassador or sebastian and try to create a man-in-the-middle attack by impersonating us then they try to offer technical support or say hey there's going to be an upgrade i can help you out install this software or give me your wallet recovery phrase or you know send me a transaction or something like that and then after they get access to your private keys either through fake software or they get access to your private keys through some sort of uh subterfuge like your wallet recovery phrase then they steal all your money and run away and then of course you think we did it and so you immediately go to us and say hey where's our money and i said well we had nothing to do with it that was an imposter so as another reminder no one from my company from amergo or from the foundation will ever ask you for your private keys or wallet recovery phrase if they are it's likely a scam almost certainly a scam uh never give it ever i will never ask you for your private recovery keys and i will never reach out to you over telegram or another channel uh saying i'm here for technical support or personal support or ask for a loan or something like that it's a scam in addition to this i do not have an instagram page or a linkedin page and i've seen several fake instagram accounts in linkedin accounts if you see them report them they are impersonations they're scams i don't have that page i just have a twitter page that's it so any other social channel that you guys see uh it's likely an imposter and it's not me i'm not on tik tok i'm not on snapchat i'm not on instagram so if you see these things get rid of them as quickly as you can then the other thing is that you know this space is always going to have scams and there's always going to be people floating around trying to separate you from your money so a general rule that i have which is if i don't understand something or something doesn't seem right slow the entire process down you will never have a situation where you regretted slowing things down a few days just to get a better understanding of what is going on and in general by doing so almost always it will get rid of many of the scammers they're high pressure you have to do it now we have to do this now because they're trying to get your money so if you don't understand anything don't invest don't send a transaction slow it down there's always next week and when in doubt uh try to federate go to the forums and ask questions go and ask ambassadors questions unfortunately i don't have a verified twitter account and uh and there's nothing i can do about that or otherwise i'd say hey if i had a blue check mark there you go if you need me to verify my identity i can do so and i can do so with my pgp key a scammer cannot do that so my charles.hoskinson gmail.com pgpkey if you go to my twitter page you'll see the fingerprint for it there i can actually sign a message with that now craig wright can't do that for the satoshi key i don't know why but i can i can with my key so if you have a problem uh just let me know and uh if you're really suspicious this is really charles hoskinson i have the ability to sign for that key and i'm happy to do so it takes me under a minute to do so i just open up the clipboard with gpg tools and type in a message usually contextual to the situation and i validate myself for example when i went into the iota discord and said hi this is charles hoskinson a lot of people they were very skeptical so i went ahead and signed a message for that gave it to the moderators and publicly posted it and then moderators yeah we just verified that this is indeed a correct pgp signature any founder of a cryptocurrency project has the capability of doing this doesn't matter if it's dan larimer or vitalik or myself this is the standard and if they can't do it they shouldn't be a cryptocurrency founder so if at any time you are dealing with a high ranking representative of a cryptocurrency ecosystem and you're suspicious about it demand they sign something with a key that you know belongs to them and from roger ver to myself we all have publicly posted pgp keys and you can check the fingerprint of that key uh on my twitter feed and verify it's there we'll probably build some slightly better pki infrastructure for our website because we're currently redoing the website for iohk to input output global and we'll make sure that every employee and agent of our company that's public facing has some form of cryptographic credential that you can verify and we will when that time comes have charles morgan post a video uh showing how to verify a pgp fingerprint and a signature and so forth and how to even use these tools yourself the easiest way of using the browser is an application called mailvelope m-a-i-l-v-e-l-o-p-e and mailvelope has been around for quite some time it uses the open pgp standard and you can generate credentials with it you can sign emails encrypt emails decrypt emails and so forth and there's an even heavier duty the gpgtools also provides that as well okay so going back and summarizing to keep this video short a lot of pump and dumps right now if you see big surges in the market almost always they're a scam or unless they're connected to a major news item like you know if google announced tomorrow that they're going to run their whole background on ethereum probably the price would go up a lot it in lieu of a major announcement like that almost certainly it's a it's some form of market manipulation the people who make money in that are people who already held the asset and had sell orders set up to walk the book uh while other people are feverishly buying uh you will probably be last money out and they were first money out so you're not gonna win when you see that it's already too late don't try you're going to lose your money my advice to you is stay out of these highly volatile events we see them all the time then of course the giveaway scams are always a scam i will never give away ada ever under any contacts especially through a giveaway event if somebody's asking you to send something to get something it is a scam it does not matter the cryptocurrency it's not done it's just scammers trying to separate you from your money i don't care if you see a video of me overlaid with something it's it's a deep fake or it's a hack i will never ask you for your ada and then of course the impersonations asking you for your private keys your wallet recovery phrase never ever ever ever under any circumstances to anyone give them your private keys or your wallet recovery phrase or install software from untrusted sources uh and if somebody over telegram talks to you claims to be me or anybody else they should be able to verify that and here's two ways of verifying for me you can see me tweet something from my twitter account usually a video okay that's pretty good but deep fakes do exist but the more certain way is access to cryptographic credentials i'm well more than willing and capable of signing a pgp message and if i need to verify myself i will do so there and you should have every right to ask that if you're confused about whether i'm real or not because if you're confused about it it's usually because the person's saying things that don't seem to add up uh and uh and of course i'm happy to verify okay thank you so much for listening and i hope this was a little helpful unfortunately with great power comes great responsibility as we've learned from uncle ben and this industry is rife with scams and agency failures and other problems and as a consequence it's up to you to be your own scam police and when in doubt slow things down there's no rush of urgency cheers
