PayPal, the US online payment giant, has launched PYUSD – their own stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Based on PayPal’s huge user base, crypto scammers acted to take advantage of the opportunity to hunt down victims. Within the first few hours of its launch, a series of misleadingly named crypto tokens surrounding the stablecoin PYUSD, which resemble its logo, were picked up by money market analysts. electronic detection. Members of the crypto community issue warnings to warn others about these fake tokens.
DEX Screener, a decentralized exchange scanner, claims to have discovered around 30 crypto token pairs that mirror PYUSD on their code. The scammers have clearly not focused on generating their tokens on any particular blockchain, instead exploring different options. At this point, the PYUSD clone token has been created on Ethereum, the BNB Smart Chain, as well as Coinbase’s brand new layer 2 chain – Base.
Fake cryptocurrencies are most often used by scammers to lottery for their victims. In these cases, the scammers ask investors to put money into their scam tokens, and after reaching the estimated total amount, they give up on the project and the chip.
In other cases, these scam tokens can be used to perform a “honeypot” type of attack, in which investors are lured into buying tokens in exchange for their cryptocurrency. Then they cannot sell the fake tokens.
Warnings about these fake tokens have appeared on social media.
PayPal launched the stablecoin on Aug. 7. When announcing the stablecoin, PayPal said: “PayPal USD is designed to contribute to the opportunity offered by stablecoins for payments and is 100% backed by deposits in U.S. dollars, short-term U.S. Treasury bills and similar cash equivalents PayPal USD is exchangeable:
1 for US dollars and is issued by the Paxos Trust Company.
How to determine the original PYUSD Stablecoin
In its official announcement, the online payment giant made it clear that PYUSD can only be exchanged between wallets that are verified and compatible with PayPal. Similar looking tokens listed with the same ticker on UniSwap or similar exchanges are most likely fake tokens.