No One Gives Away $500,000 of Bitcoin (Anymore)

The only time I’ve ever seen anyone giving away bitcoin no strings attached was quite literally in the first 18 months of bitcoin’s existence.

Author

Adam Atlantic
February 20, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Yesterday I wrote to you about more scams that I’ve seen come across my inbox over the last week.

Well, I gave you details of one, the more common and often far more devastating one.

Today I’ll explain the other, and show you the only time bitcoin was given away legitimately…

Scam #2: the fake giveaway

The other email I got this week was about a bitcoin giveaway. The reader received an email with the choice of three boxes. Choosing the right one would entitle them to over one bitcoin in winnings.

It was 100% a scam.

The only time I’ve ever seen anyone giving away bitcoin no strings attached was quite literally in the first 18 months of bitcoin’s existence. The bitcoin faucet used to drip out five bitcoin for solving a captcha.

That no longer exists, and I’ve never seen a free giveaway since that was legitimate.

Source: Wayback Machine[1] 

At the time Gavin Andresen was running this, and it was real. He said on a Bitcointalk Forum page:[2]

‘For my first Bitcoin coding project, I decided to do something that sounds really dumb:  I created a web site that gives away Bitcoins. It is at: https://freebitcoins.appspot.com/

‘Five ฿ per customer, first come first served, I've stocked it with ฿1,100 to start.  I'll add more once I'm sure it is working properly.

‘Why? Because I want the Bitcoin project to succeed, and I think it is more likely to be a success if people can get a handful of coins to try it out.  It can be frustrating to wait until your node generates some coins (and that will get more frustrating in the future), and buying Bitcoins is still a little bit clunky.

‘Please try it out and get some free coins, even if you already have more Bitcoins than you know what to do with.’

But it’s gone now. And no one gives away any serious value in bitcoin anymore. In short, any giveaway for free bitcoin is most likely trying to scam you.

These “giveaway” scams are one of two things (sometimes both)…

1. They’re what’s known as a “phishing scam”. This is to get you to click on a malicious link or head to a site to register personal information while the scammers are injecting your computer with malware or some kind of virus.

These are designed to sit dormant in your computer until you do something like connect a hardware device or make a wallet-to-wallet crypto transaction. There are variations of the malware and attack that can be used, but the first instance is to get you clicking on something and going somewhere you shouldn’t.

2. The second thing these do, is pretend you’ve won, but then require you to register on a site, like the one described yesterday, again requiring a lot of personal info and even possibly providing bank account details to receive the “winnings”.

Again, all a scam. They might then try to get you to pay the “winners fee” or add money to an account to release the bitcoin. Then maybe they suck you into the first scam outlined yesterday.

These are all variations of the same sort of thing, trying every-which-way to fleece you of your money using bitcoin and crypto as the hook.

None of it is real. If you see something like this, delete it and don’t click. If you have clicked, run a deep scan of your computer for viruses and malware, and maybe use another computer for any crypto activity.

Be safe out there, let us know if you’re worried about something you’re involved in or you suspect might be a scam and you want us to check.

Trust in crypto,

Adam Atlantic