TRON Genesis Scam: TRX Cryptocurrency Hard Fork Was Meticulously Planned

Tron Genesis – The Meticulously Planned Scam

Often, the presence of scams mars the appeal that the cryptocurrency sector has to investors. While an attempt to scam the TRON blockchain was disenchanted beforehand, it had already caused considerable damage, albeit small. The fraudsters behind the swindling effort managed to hack the account of the coin’s moderator and posted fake news regarding a hard fork on the TRON blockchain.

https://twitter.com/KingOfCrypto6/status/1009143825447686146

A few weeks ago, the much-awaited TRON mainnet went live. Moments later, the coin's community was informed of two impending hard forks through counterfeit TRON websites. Apparently, the two sites were a replica of the official outlets that are usually used to propagate news concerning the TRON cryptocurrency (TRX). One of the articles (it has since been deleted) appeared on the Medium blogging platform, claiming that a hard fork known as Tron Genesis has been completed.

This fud was well organized:
– they destroyed the main TRON telegram chat
– opened a new chat as 'official'
– Kicked out tron team from reddittopic
– now asking to change tron for skycoin to call it "Tron Genesis"

details are here. IT HAS NOTHING to do with TRON its just FUD. pic.twitter.com/lWHxxfKPSH

— Lucas not holding any Bitcoin (@crypchart) June 19, 2018

As per the forged announcements, the forking of the TRON blockchain was as a result of a disagreement between TRON’s founder Justin Sun and a group of developers. The developers were supposedly aggrieved by the founder’s ‘loss of direction’ and decide to take matters into their own hands. Therefore, the developers forked the platform using the Skycoin blockchain. Specifically, the swindlers stated that TRON could not compete with Ethereum since the latter is an established brand in the crypto sector. Furthermore, TRON's primary goal was to become a decentralized entertainment platform, rather than a mere Ethereum copycat.

To claim the resultant tokens from the hard fork (TRXG), current TRX owners had to follow an intricate procedure. The process involved the creation of a digital ETH wallet on the MyEtherWallet platform, followed by the declaration of private keys, a factor that arose suspicion amongst traders. In an attempt to legitimize this scam, the hackers gained access to a TRON’s moderator Reddit account and pinned this entire process. Luckily, users noticed something was amiss and notified other to take precautionary steps through the comments section of the social media.

Up to now, nobody knows what transpired to the compromised account. Nonetheless, the impact of such fraudulent schemes cannot be underestimated (even if they are thwarted), as they can severely damage the reputation of a coin. When the news broke out, TRX underwent a mild dip in market value, but it has since overcome and is starting to gain momentum. Hopefully, his attempt will inspire other coins to enforce stringent security measures to prevent the possibility of being targeted by such scammers.