Unfortunately, scams are prevalent on the web and particularly in the FinTech and Crypto sectors.
Accointing by Glassnode has seen a considerable uptick in the number of people reporting scams since the summer. Victims have reported that they are being contacted by third parties, announcing that they had an outstanding balance and that this was currently “frozen”. They were then told that the funds could be “unfrozen” for a payment, usually for gas fees. Once a payment was made, the bad actors disappeared.
That is the general gist of the scam, some have reported that they were contacted by someone posing to be a member of the Accointing team, perhaps with an email address that has Accointing in the name, such as accointing.tax, accointing.biz, accointin.com, etc. These same scammers may also have official looking documents, with the Accointing logo and other information plastered throughout, to enter into payment agreements with their targets.
In order to understand how this is a scam, it is important to understand what Accointing by Glassnode does.
Accointing by Glassnode is a crypto portfolio tracker and a tax report generation service. This means that if you have one or several accounts through different companies, such as Coinbase, Kraken or Gate.io(to name a few), Accointing provides the ability to track your portfolio from one place. To do this, a user enters in their public wallet address or their read-only API credentials. That connection will automatically update as transactions are made. Then, our tax report generation service will calculate taxes owed based on the gains and losses accrued on those transactions for the tax year.
But, no funds are ever transferred in or out of Accointing by Glassnode. They are held by whatever companies you transact through.
Scammers will manually enter fake transactions into the platform as “proof” that there is an outstanding balance. There is nothing legitimate about these transactions or these balances. Accointing lets legitimate users enter in manual information into the system to keep track of holdings that are not supported, and generate tax reports for those unsupported chains and coins.
It is unfortunate that nefarious third parties are using the Accointing platform to dupe their unsuspecting targets out of money. Here are some tips to avoid getting scammed:
- Accointing will never use an email address that uses anything other than @accointing.com.
- Accointing does not hold money. There is no way to deposit money into Accointing and you cannot make transactions through Accointing, therefore there is no way to withdraw money through Accointing.
- Accointing will never freeze your account. Again, even though there is no money held in your account, Accointing will certainly never claim to freeze it.
- Accointing does not send official looking documents to its users. Our Terms and Services covers everything a user needs to agree to.
- It is important that you remember whether or not you ever invested in crypto and through which crypto company you opened an account (Remember Accointing does not hold funds, so crypto holdings must be purchased elsewhere).
- You can always emailsupport@accointing.com if there are any questions about the legitimacy of an account.
We do collect information about scammers and the methods they are using. Feel free to forward any documentation to scams@accointing.com to help us combat their efforts.
Please be wary, protect yourselves and educate yourselves as best you can.