A Chinese cryptocurrency investor has been deceived 4 million yuan worth of digital assets in an EOS scam, according to a message from Wechat, a popular social media platform in China.

The swindler registered a twitter account impersonating the EOS.IO team a long time ago, and has copied the official account content since then, allowing users feel this account is real. The fake account, @eos_token, has attracted 5,547 followers so far.

On January 15, it published an uplifting news ,“we are excited to announce an airdrop of $EOS tokens: 16 $EOS for every ETH that you hold. 0.3 $EOS for every $EOS that you have.”

According to the EOS Airdrop website, rules for this airdrop event is not common: virtual currency exchanges,like Binance, Bitfinex,Bithumb will not support this airdrop and will not provide bonus to EOS and ETH holders;in order to receive free “ candy”, investors have to create a personal Ethereum wallet（like MyEtherWallet）,and then withdraw EOS and ETH tokens from exchanges to personal digital wallets. Finally, participants need to enter the private key of his own Ethereum wallet.

Once you input the private key, all of your ETH and ERC 20tokens are shifted to the thief’s wallet immediately. Are you likely to get back the missing tokens? Highly unlikely. Because the man behind the fake account must be an adept thief and will sell off the stolen assets as soon as possible.

What can victims do?

First, check the website eos-token.org to see if any clues can be found. Second, keep track of clues popped up in this Twitter account . If possible, victims could report the scam to Twitter, and urge the company to shut down the fake account. Third, pay attention to this wallet 0x11e10485a869018ffa4ba093e4af2b461a4e4697 which sees digital tokens in and out all the time. It is evident that there are still innocent investors getting cheated.

How to avoid such token scam trap?

First, do not be greedy. Although you can get quick money by investing in the blockchain industry recently, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second, take good care of your private key and “wallet words”, and never share them with anyone. Third, have a good master of blockchain-related knowledge.

As is known so far, more than 4 Chinese investors lost money in this scam. The fake account is still in normal operation by press time, which continues to publish the airdrop news. But the EOS airdrop website has been labeled as ” phishing site” by MetaMask .