Scams, frauds, and safety — Bitcoin courses for staying secure

A field guide to the schemes targeting Bitcoin users, the security habits that protect your sats, and the psychological tricks scammers use on everyone.

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What is scams & safety?

Most Bitcoin "hacks" are not technical attacks on Bitcoin itself. The cryptography is solid; nobody is breaking it. The losses come from social engineering — convincing people to send sats to the wrong address, type their seed phrase into the wrong website, or trust support staff who don't exist.

A scams-and-safety course is half catalogue and half psychology. The catalogue side is the specific schemes — phishing, pig-butchering, fake support, address poisoning, SIM swaps, fake giveaways. Once you've seen them named, the next one is much easier to spot. The psychology side is the playbook — urgency, authority, scarcity, social proof — that scammers use on everyone, regardless of how technical they are.

The course also teaches operational security — opsec — which is the boring set of habits that prevent most attacks from succeeding in the first place. Verify addresses. Use 2FA. Don't broadcast your stack. Treat every "support" message as suspicious by default. None of it is glamorous; all of it works.

What you'll learn

  • 1Identify the five most common Bitcoin scams of 2026 — at a glance
  • 2Spot a phishing message before you click anything
  • 3Recognise fake support contact on Telegram, Discord, and SMS
  • 4Defend against address-poisoning attacks with a 5-second habit
  • 5Lock down your phone number against SIM-swap attempts
  • 6See through the social-engineering playbook scammers use on everyone
  • 7Pass the operational security habits to your family in ten minutes

Why it matters

You can do everything else right — buy at the right time, store in self-custody, never sell — and lose your stack in five minutes to a single scam. Bitcoin transactions cannot be reversed. There is no fraud department. Once your sats are gone, they are gone. That asymmetry is what makes scams the single largest source of loss in the space.

For families this matters even more. A teenager with a Bitcoin wallet who hasn't been taught what a phishing message looks like is a target. Scammers absolutely will go after younger users — they're less suspicious, more impulsive, and often have parents who will reimburse losses out of guilt. Protecting your kids means teaching them, not isolating them. The protection is in the knowledge.

Sample insight from our courses

Bitcoin transactions are final. Slow down. Verify. Then sign.
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Earn Bitcoin while you learn

Every lesson ends with a quiz. Pass it, the sats land in your self-custody wallet automatically — your keys, your control. Subscribers also earn 50% sats-back on every payment, monthly. The only Bitcoin platform where the lessons pay you instead of the other way around.

How we teach scams & safety

We show real examples. Real phishing emails (with sender details redacted), real fake-support messages, real screenshots of address-poisoning attacks. Once you've seen the real thing, the next one looks obvious.

We teach the psychology before the techniques. Knowing the playbook ("they're creating urgency to bypass your judgement; slow down") protects you against scams that haven't even been invented yet.

Each scenario ends with a quiz. The quiz is the point — you don't actually know you can spot a scam until you've been tested on a fake one. We do the testing in the course so the real test happens to you in safety.

For kids the same content is reframed as "tricks people will try to play on you". Same scams, same psychology, same defences — just at the level of a 10-year-old who is becoming aware of the internet as a place where strangers want things from them.

Who this is for

Newly self-custody

You just took your sats off an exchange. The next attack vector is YOU. Learn the patterns now.

Family lead

You want to make sure nobody in your family hands over their seed phrase. Teach them the playbook here.

High-stack holder

You're a target. Operational security stops being optional once your stack is meaningful.

Frequently asked

What's the most common Bitcoin scam right now?

Pig-butchering — long-form social engineering via dating apps and messaging apps that culminates in the victim being walked through "investing" their Bitcoin into a fake platform. We dedicate a full lesson to it because the dollar volume is enormous and the format keeps evolving.

If I'm using a hardware wallet, am I safe?

Hardware wallets defend against malware on your computer. They do not defend against social engineering — if you sign a transaction sending sats to a scammer's address, the hardware wallet will happily sign it. Operational habits matter regardless of your storage choice.

How do I know if a "support" message is real?

Default rule: support never contacts you first. If a message arrives unbidden claiming to be from any service — exchange, wallet, BTCBitByBit — assume it is a scam until you verify by going to the official channel yourself.

What if I've already been scammed?

The hardest answer in this space: most lost Bitcoin is unrecoverable. Report the scam to your local fraud authority (in the UK, Action Fraud), document everything, and do not engage with anyone offering to "recover" your funds — they are scams targeting scam victims.

How do I protect my kids?

Teach them. The kids version of this course is built for that. We frame the patterns in age-appropriate language and use examples from places kids actually spend time online.

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