Today, investors who were eagerly waiting for their opportunity to join the Bee Token ICO were robbed for 100s of ETH. Scammers managed to get their hands on the Bee Token mailing list and sent out a phishing email stating that the ICO was now open, followed by an Ethereum address to send their contributions to.

Bee Token is a blockchain-based home sharing service that has built up a lot of hype in the past few months. Due to their strong team, consisting of former Uber, Google, and Facebook employees, as well as the huge potential of their idea, many people had signed up to their mailing list so they could be one of the first to join the ICO.

To try and entice people to send their ETH, the scammers also stated that they had formed a surprise partnership with Microsoft and would be giving participants a 100% bonus for all contributions in the next 6 hours. If that wasn’t a big enough red flag, the scammers guaranteed that the value of Bee Token would double within 2 months, or your would receive your Ethereum back.

Two different versions of the email were identified with different Ethereum addresses:

Do not send any ETH to these addresses, they have been confirmed to be part of a phishing scam. So far, over 700 ETH (~830,000 USD) has been sent to these addresses and transactions are still coming in 7 hours later.

The Bee Token team sent out an email one hour after the phishing email was sent. In this email, they warned investors about the fake emails and told them where they could find the real ICO address.

This situation has caused some uncertainty in potential Bee Token investors. Either someone working for Bee Token used their email list maliciously, or they were hacked, allowing someone to obtain the email list and potentially other information. Both of these possibilities don’t bode well for a company that is meant to have some of the best talent in the field.

When investing in an ICO, never send ETH to an address you received in an email, always go through the official website. If you were affected by this scam, or another Bee Token scam, you can report it to the team using this form. For more information regarding Bee Token security, read this notice from the Bee Token team.