Crypto scams took at least $9.9 billion from victims in 2024, by Chainalysis’s count in its February 2025 report. The firm expected that number to reach $12.4 billion as more addresses were identified. Fake airdrops are one of the most common ways in.
One rule kills most of them: a real airdrop never needs you to send crypto or share a key. Everything else is detail on top of that.
The red flags, in the order they matter
Someone asks for your seed phrase or private key. Always a scam, with no exceptions worth entertaining. Your seed phrase is your wallet. No legitimate claim process has ever needed one and none ever will.
You have to pay to claim. “Send 0.01 ETH to verify your wallet” or “cover the gas for your claim” is theft with extra steps. Claiming a real airdrop costs you a normal network fee paid to the network, never a payment to the project.
The claim page is not on the project’s own domain. This is the one that catches experienced people. Check the URL against the project’s own site and docs, not against the post that sent you there. Scam clones use near-miss spellings like arb1trum.com or claim-arbitrum.io. One character is all it takes.
An approval or signature you cannot read. Modern drainers do not ask for a deposit. They ask for a signature that grants token approval, then empty the wallet later. If your wallet shows a permission request you do not understand, reject it.
The announcement exists only in a DM or an unverified group. Real drops are announced on the project’s own site, its verified account and its official Discord. If it is not in at least one of those, it does not exist.
The reward is a flat, large number. “$5,000 in free tokens, claim now” is a scam. Genuine retroactive drops pay proportionally to what you actually did, so amounts vary by wallet and are usually modest.
A countdown timer. Manufactured urgency exists to stop you checking. Real claim windows run for weeks or months and the deadline is published in advance on the project’s own channels.
Random tokens in your wallet are bait
Unsolicited tokens appearing in a wallet you never connected anywhere are a known attack, not luck. The token’s name usually points at a website and that website is the trap: approving the token to sell it is what drains the wallet.
Leave them alone. Do not approve, do not swap, do not visit the site in the token name. Hiding them in your wallet interface costs nothing and ends the problem.
A verified account can still post a drainer link
Account trust is not link trust. Official project accounts do get compromised and the first thing an attacker posts is a claim link that looks entirely legitimate because it comes from the real account.
So the check is on the link itself, every time: is this domain the project’s own, does the project’s website point at it, does the docs page name the same URL. An announcement from the right account with the wrong domain is still a scam.
What to do if you already connected
Move fast and in this order. Transfer what is left to a fresh wallet with a new seed phrase, because the compromised one stays compromised. Revoke the token approvals you granted, using a revocation tool on the chain involved. Then assume the old wallet is public and stop using it for anything.
Do not accept help from anyone who contacts you afterwards offering recovery. Recovery scams specifically target people who just lost funds. They are the second wave of the same attack.
How we check the listings here
Every claim link on this site is checked against the project’s own domain before it goes live. A claim is only ever called live when the contract is verified on a block explorer and a project-owned source links that same address. When we cannot verify a claim path, the page says the claim is not verified and links the project’s home page instead.
That is also the standard to hold any other aggregator to, including this one. If a page tells you to claim somewhere and does not show you where that came from, treat it the way you would treat a DM.
If you are new to this, start with how real airdrops actually work so the fakes stand out faster.
Last checked 19 September 2026.
