Stage 1 · Start Here · Lesson 05
The five scams to know before you touch anything
Before your first real transaction on Arc, learn the five scam patterns that catch newcomers: recovery-phrase theft, malicious signatures, fake tokens, fake support, urgency.
Crypto's honest parts are genuinely useful; its dishonest parts are industrialised. The good news: nearly every scam that catches newcomers is one of five patterns, and each has a single defence. Learn these before your first real transaction and you are safer than most veterans.
1. Recovery-phrase theft
Anything that asks for your 12 or 24 words — a support agent, a wallet sync tool, a validation site — is theft, with zero exceptions in the history of the technology. The defence: the phrase exists on paper and nowhere else, forever.
2. The malicious signature
Wallets ask you to sign things, and signatures can be harmless logins or can grant spending access to your assets. Drainer sites disguise the second as the first, which is exactly how fake airdrop checkers empty wallets. The defence: sign nothing you do not understand, and treat any site that requires a signature just to show you information as hostile. Our own activity checker is paste-an-address, with no wallet connection — that is what legitimate looks like.
3. The fake token
Anyone can create a token with any name, including ARC and including the name of any real company. A ticker is a costume, not an identity. The defence: only a project's own primary source — for ARC, arc.io or circle.com, and nothing else — tells you a real token's real address. Currently every ARC trading is fake by definition.
4. Fake support and the hostile DM
Post a question in any crypto community and support will DM you within minutes, helpful and patient, steering you to pattern one or two. Real teams answer in public and never DM first. The defence: every unsolicited DM about your money is an attack. All of them.
5. Urgency
Claim window closes tonight. Snapshot in three hours. Only 200 spots. Every scam above needs you to move faster than you think. Real infrastructure — and Arc is run by the least impulsive institutions in finance — does not expire in hours. The defence: slowness. Any pressure to act now is itself the tell.
You have finished Start Here. Next stage: Money on Arc.
