For those of you who are new to cryptocurrency and new to this account, this post is going to clue you in on how to avoid being a victim of an ICO scam.

For those of you who are experienced in this space, I’m also going to show you a very helpful tool you can use before you invest Ethereum for a new ICO. It’s free and it can save you a lot of money.

It seems like the reputation and popularity of MyEtherWallet is constantly the tool that scammers use to try and trick unsuspecting crypto users into sending them some Ether.

There are a couple reasons for this.

• First, the legit MyEtherWallet is indeed open source.

It’s great that this service is open source, but because this code is able to be viewed by anyone who is interested in doing so, it’s also open to be copied by anyone interested in doing so. As we’ve seen for quite some time now, many of those interested in this code are those wanting to use it for fraudulent activity.

• Second, many of the ICOs these days are run on Ethereum and are ERC20 tokens.

Because MyEtherWallet is a wallet provider and is an access point for these ERC20 tokens, it’s the perfect tool for scammers to utilize.

There are a couple ways you can find yourself on a fake MyEtherWallet website:

1.) If you are a member of a slack channel for an ERC20 token you might receive a private message that urges you to immediately click the link provided and give them your details, usually they say there has been an emergency hard fork or some situation that required immediate action. Please know that these are fake and if you click the link and follow their directions, you will lose money.

2.) If you use Google search many times the first options are indeed imposter sites that pay to be the top listings.
Avoid this by typing in the URL yourself, and using a bookmark.

If you’re interested in investing in an ICO but you’re not completely sure if the address you’re about to send your Ether investment to is legit, then you need to check out this awesome app.

Here is a website that lists scammy websites and I think everyone should know about, and bookmark it. The URL is etherscamdb.info.
It shows you the category, subcategory, status, and URL of these fraudulent sites so that you can know if you are about to visit or have visited a scam site.

Thanks to the people behind MyEtherWallet, there is a way to track Ethereum addresses with the EtherAddressLookup, or EAL. This is particularly helpful if you want to know if you are about to interact with a blacklisted address.
You can very easily interact with the EAL by downloading the Google Chrome app.

The app also provides links for MyEtherWallet, although I would still recommend that you manually type that URL in, you can also find links to etherscan.io to track transactions and view your wallet.
You can see Ethereum Network Stats for information on how the network is running and the mining activity happening.
There is a link for ethplorer.io- thank you Ethereum for that great name to pronounce, making me sound like Mike Tyson… this is where you can see the activity of the top Ethereum tokens, and see how the coins are distributed among its holders.
And you can also use the last two links to check out the Ethereum and EthTrader Reddit pages.

Additional Reading/Sources:

Check if ETH address is a scam
Chrome extension for EAL
Tips from MEW for avoiding scams
ICO Tracker
Steemit user @rahulbhuyan9 gives great specific details on ICO scams and lists past scams
Blockchain Graveyard- Learn how crypto projects failed thanks to hackers