The crypto exchange GMO Coin, a subsidiary of the Japanese internet giant GMO, has cautioned its customers worldwide about a new con that has spread over the past week.
The firm, which was smacked with a business development order by the Japanese regulator (FSA) in 2018, stated that the campaign tried to trick operators into retrieving a scam website via clone advertisements on the search site Yahoo! JAPAN, where staves strained to get their login identifications. Once they’re opened, the loss spreads quickly.
Fake advertisements are a classic instance of phishing attacks on websites that look official and encourage people to enter personal information and other useful details. But since the links and the websites are fake, those details are essentially sent to scammers who want to use them for hateful purposes.
The company stated in its press release that “On the search site Yahoo! JAPAN, an advertisement disguises itself as our company, and after guiding a false login page, a malicious fraud is confirmed to enter important information such as the customer’s login e-mail address and password.“
GMO Coin is particularly concerning because the logins are valuable, not just as ways of getting people’s information. The company has recently announced numerous initiatives, including allowing customers to lend their cryptocurrency to the platform and obtain rental fees according to the volume of coins they lend.
In 2018, the subsidiary of the Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed firm, which also functions as the major retail FX trading services provider in Japan, became the official sponsor of the Japanese baseball team, the Chiba Lotte Marines.
These types of scammers are inclined to emphasize the clientele of monetary facilities workers and often send emails that seem to have come from the corporation itself. But in detail, the link will be fake, and snapping via would lead to an indistinguishable but hateful type of website.
In September 2018, the company offered two crypto exchange and trading services but never had a live trading platform until now. Its two existing services are a brokerage service and a margin trading service. GMO Coin calls the former a sales office service and the latter a virtual currency FX ability. The company’s live platform presentation familiarizes the third service GMO Coin proposes.
The firm had stated:
On the exchange, all orders are displayed as board information. Since you can see all the [order] quantities…you can trade while seeing the buying and selling demand of investors other than yourself.