✅ TON Safety: Beware of Wallet SPAM
What is wallet spam, and how to cope with it?
Spamming, means sending communications that you did not ask for (unsolicited).
You know those annoying phone calls where people phone and try to sell you something? Somehow they got your phone number, even randomly.
Or those fraudsters, crooks, scammers who call up and say they're from some company that needs to fix your computer remotely, or some other trick?
Most people have become educated about how to deal with such, generally to hang up the phone and ignore them.
Similarly, with spam in your email, companies trying to sell things, scammers trying to trick you, and the same on social media networks such as Telegram.
Well, on The Open Network (TON) you will also receive SPAM payments!
So what is a spam payment, how do I recognize it, and how do I deal with it?
Have you noticed that when you make or receive a payment using TonSafe there is the possibility to include a message? Next time you are on that screen tap on the red "?" there to get an education about how to use the Message box, or not to use it.
Well, anyone can find wallet addresses by using a TON explorer such as tonscan.org and watching transactions to or from well known addresses such as Crypto Bot.
They can then send payments of a minimal amount such as 0.0001 TON or even less, and along with the blockchain fee of around 0.005 TON, this is all it costs them to "spam" you - and advertise their product or service to you.
Scammers will make a spam payment to you and try to trick you into sending them TON for example as a get-rich quick scheme, pyramid, gamble, "investment", or "validator" or whatever other idea they can come up with.
The bottom line is simply this: almost all such claims are scams. Do not fall for it. Simply ignore such payment messages, and take no action.
They cannot do anything to you. Most people on TON receive these spam payments, the more active they are the more likely they will get them.
Some wallets have tried to filter payment spam with disastrous results: there are no TON wallets that can yet do this correctly.
At TonSafe we do not introduce filters that do not work, or are misleading.
All you need to know is you got a tiny payment (but also had to pay a tiny amount to receive it, but there is no way to not receive payments on the blockchain), and the sender cannot learn anything about you, nor harm you in any way.
Annoying it can be, just like with phone, email and social media spam.
But there CAN be legitimate uses for sending small payments along with a message. Can you think of any? Here are a few possibilities:
- You want to reach a friend or a friend wants to reach you via such a message
- Someone sent you money by mistake and wants to ask you to send it back
These are possible reasons for such small payments along with a message, so it doesn't necessarily mean you should ignore them all, but as a rule of thumb, anything less than 0.01 TON or even 0.1 TON could probably be ignored.
Hopefully if some (ex) friend wants to reach you via TonSafe as you have switched off all forms of communication, they'll pay more than 0.1 TON for the privilege!
Likewise anyone who lost money sending it to your address by mistake, will hopefully spend more than 0.1 TON in an effort to persuade you to return it.
This is also why TonSafe won't notify you of any payment below 0.1 TON but also won't hide it from your payment history.
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