Boss Track Update To Remove Airdrop Scam Tokens From Website
One of the most apparent issues we encountered in BossTrack’s development is the nature of airdrop scam tokens that find their way into BSC and Ethereum wallet addresses in particular.
For those not in the know, if you look at the tokens a wallet address holds, you will most likely find a lot of tokens that weren’t purchased by the user that got sent to them.
These tokens will often be deceptive in nature, manipulating supply and price to give holders the false idea that these tokens are worth a small fortune.
These cryptocurrency tokens will typically have no logo, listing on CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap or centralized exchange and a very small market cap.
A common scam that is used doesn’t allow the holder to trade them via typical means like trading on a Decentralized Exchange, it relies on the user googling the token name to find a website charging a bogus “gas fee” to withdraw the tokens that are typically worth much more than the gas fee.
The scam as you could expect is to take the bogus “gas fee” from the holder and not let them sell their tokens.
This is one example. There are of course quite a few variations of this airdrop scam that could compromise your wallet if interacted with. We strongly advise not to interact or trade with tokens just randomly given to your wallet for no apparent reason.
This became such a problem that when adding a new wallet address to the BossTrack, your screen would be populated with many such cases.
The only 2 tokens that were actually added by the wallet holder was “Boss Token” and “Binance Coin”, everything else was airdropped.
We realised seeing this for new users is a horrible user experience and at worst could inadvertently fuel the perceived value of these bogus tokens.
So we can up with an update to help fix the problem.
- Remove coins from being automatically added with a URL in the name.
- Only automatically add coins that have been listed on CoinGecko.
Removing coins with a URL in the name is obvious in making it harder for scammers to use the bogus “gas fee” trick. In addition only allowing coins to be automatically added that are on CoinGecko filters out a lot of scam tokens that can’t get past the listing criteria on the site.
This gives new users the information they want, as in, it will automatically add the majority of the coins they actually want to track and hide the scam tokens that used to clutter the portfolio page.
What if I want to track a token that isn’t listed on CoinGecko?
If a coin is really new or underground and hasn’t listed on CoinGecko yet, you can still add it to your portfolio tracking page by clicking the “New Token” button, where you can add the token address to begin tracking on your portfolio age.
Of course this doesn’t mean it’s impossible for airdrop scam tokens to bypass our system, users will stay have to exercise common sense and extreme caution when interacting with tokens they get randomly airdropped.
We know this change will make using Boss Track more enjoyable
