The phenomenon generated by the series Squid Game, recently released on Netflix, has been so massive that it is difficult not to have heard about it, if not seen it. Obviously, with such a viral success, many clever people are trying to surf on this wave, by proposing fake projects – but real scams as the cryptosphere is used to – stamped with the name of the series.
A new meme token “Squid Game” explodes by +5500%… before collapsing miserably
With its global distribution via Netflix, the South Korean series Squid Game has managed to make news everywhere, with its participants of a kind of reality show playing deadly games that are themselves based on children’s games.
A viral trend that has fueled the ideas of crooks and pirates of all kinds. In the euphoria of the phenomenon, some are indeed trying to deceive the over-enthusiastic fans of the series.
This was the case of the Squid Game (SQUID) token which exploited – without any apparent license – the name of the series. As can be seen in particular on the price charts of this token on CoinMarketCap, SQUID literally exploded from less than $0.10 to more than $2,861 in a few days!
Yet, obviously, the scam story was too good to be true: this morning, it’s a hangover for buyers, as the crypto collapsed… speculators who had positioned themselves being unable to resell this SQUID on PancakeSwap, even as the site attached to the “project” went offline.
A meme token is already suspicious, but beware of hackers
This SQUID token, present on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), was undoubtedly inspired by the viral and unexpected success of Shiba Inu (SHIB), itself inspired by Dogecoin (DOGE), the first of its kind of “meme cryptos”, and whose initial success is almost exclusively due to the image of a friendly dog of the Shiba Inu breed – with which the whimsical Elon Musk seems to have fallen in love.
As a precaution and in view of this hype token, let’s remember a basic rule to follow for the Sunday crypto investor: stay away from these funny and dangerous pranks, with sites that are quickly dispatched and take advantage of the general public’s interest to mislead them. But that’s not all: beyond the case of this mock-crypto, other smart guys are already looking to take advantage of it to hack Squid Game fans.
As TechRepublic reports, cybersecurity specialists at Kaspersky have reported that between September and October 2021, several dozen malicious files appeared on the Net with a name referring to Squid Game.
“One of the cybercriminals’ schemes worked as follows: the victim would have run [a video file] of an animated version of the first game in the series [Squid Game], while simultaneously, a Trojan horse was launched invisibly, capable of stealing data from users’ various browsers and sending it back to the attackers’ server. (…) “.
In addition to paying attention to URL links of sites hosting files that use the name of the series, Kaspersky experts recommend paying close attention to executable files ending in .EXE, .PKG, .DMG or .MSI.
Protecting yourself from suspicious sites and files is a matter of course, even if we can understand the enthusiasm created by a new trend, it is above all a question of vigilance. On the side of meme tokens, too much speculative greed can be costly, as we saw recently with Shiba Inu, who was hit on the snout by Elon Musk.
