Facebook Libra scams already bubbling up online

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With Facebook’s Libra hitting the scene, its created a whole new market for a certain type of opportunist: scammers. It didn’t take very long for scheming scam artists to find a way to capitalize on Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into digital currency, and hopefully most people are smart enough to avoid their traps.

CoinDesk reports that a site named calìbra.com, named for Facebook’s soon to be released wallet, has already popped up offering pre-sales of the Libra currency. This is different from the official site, calibra.com, but it artfully uses the ì with a grave accent rather than the normal English i to fool potential marks.

The Russian scam website mostly resembles Facebook’s official offering, with mostly the same content and design. What’s notably different is a button in the top right corner that offers a “Pre-Sale Libra Currency.” Which, if followed, will offer trades of Libra for Ethereum.

Another site, Zuckbucks.cash, offers a swap of Ethereum for ZBUX. This one is played as a joke though, as the site advertises “Why wait for LIBRA when you can throw your money away TODAY?” It specifically notes that ZBUX have no real use, but jokes that buying them will help make Mark Zuckerberg richer.

One would hope that the obvious parody of ZBUX is a bit more successful than the potential scam of calìbra. Anyone who would want to put the effort into buying Ethereum just to buy a pre-sale of Libra would hopefully be smart enough to realize, at some step of the way, that Libra isn’t actually available for sale at this point and take a step back. ZBUX, on the other hand, advertises that they already have 981,042 tokens in circulation purely for fundraising goal, as they openly admit, to be “spent to pay for gas.”

These easily avoidable traps aren’t likely to be the last laid out before the unsuspecting public. Many in the crypto space have already been scammed by more sophisticated con artists, and better scams are likely to bubble up as Libra comes closer to launch. That’s something that the public pressure that’s starting to come down on Facebook is best to pay attention to.