Crypto Security Best Practices to Shield Your Digital Investments
In 2024, the crypto stolen by hackers in on-chain incidents increased by 31.61% year-over-year (YoY) compared to 2023's data. According to CertiK's Hack3d Web3 Security Report 2024, digital asset investors and organisations lost a total of $2.36 billion last year. Researchers ranked phishing as the top attack vector, which claimed $1.05 billion from victims across 296 incidents.
As hackers are continuously targeting digital asset investors, it's critical to follow crypto security best practices to protect your funds. In this article, we will review these best practices with a focus on ensuring the safety of your VALR account. Let's get started!
Crypto Security Best Practices: How to Ensure Your VALR Account's Safety?
As of January 9, 2025, the crypto market capitalisation has increased to $3.26 trillion. Since so much capital has been poured into over 2.4 million different digital assets in an industry that lacks a comprehensive regulatory framework globally or even locally in some jurisdictions, digital asset investors have become prime targets for bad actors.
Attackers leverage sophisticated tactics to steal your hard-earned coins in your VALR account, such as:
Offering you "assistance" as part of a friendly fraudster scheme in which perpetrators use screen-sharing software to trick you.
Presenting fake or misleading credentials, often as part of impersonation and phishing scams, to gain your trust and access your crypto in your VALR account.
Cryptocurrency recovery scams, which exploit investors who have already become a victim of a digital asset hack or fraud by pretending to be investigators and promising them the swift recovery of lost funds in exchange for a fee.
You should also be aware of fake trading websites and cryptocurrency trading scams promising risk-free and unrealistic profits in a short time.
Fortunately, applying cryptocurrency security best practices can ensure your VALR account's safety. These include:
Educate yourself about cryptocurrency to learn the basics and know about the potential risks, threats, and dangers. VALR's blog is an excellent resource for this.
Use a strong password. It should be at least eight characters long, combining uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Make sure that this password is unique and not used on any other websites. You should never reveal this password to anyone and deny any requests for your sign-in credentials.
Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on your VALR account.
Stay vigilant and beware of phishing scams. Never open or download attachments from emails with unknown senders. Always use the official VALR URL for trading (valr.com) and channels for communication (e.g., our support emails always end with "@valr.com").
Keep your device virus-free with regular scans and avoid using public, shared, or insecure computers, smartphones, or tablets.
If others are using the same device as you are using to access your VALR account, you should always log out of your account after each session to ensure your funds' security.
Regularly monitor your account for suspicious activity.
If you notice suspicious activity related to your VALR account, you should report it to our support team at help@valr.com. Doing so helps us protect your funds, as well as combat scammers and hackers more efficiently.
Be Aware of Impersonation and Phishing Scams
As highlighted in CertiK's report, phishing currently represents the most significant threat to crypto investors. So, it's crucial to be aware of this strategy, which scammers often combine with the impersonation of reputable companies, financial institutions, exchanges, and even celebrities.
Scammers' goal is to deceive crypto investors, making them believe they are receiving communication from a legit account. They seek to earn victims' trust by creating fake websites and social media profiles that resemble legitimate entities closely, using similar language, logos, and names to appear genuine. In their messages or posts, they find an excuse or an opportunity (e.g., a bogus giveaway or upgrading account security) to lure victims and convince them to share their account credentials or private keys with them.
Scammers impersonating VALR pretend to be VALR or someone from the team. If it's email communication, they usually use addresses very similar to VALR's (e.g., help@valr.co instead of help@valr.com). In most cases, they ask you to share your credentials due to a non-existing issue with your account or offer you an investing opportunity promising unrealistic profits and requiring a large deposit or upfront payment to release the fake funds.
Read this article to learn more about impersonation and phishing scams and the best practices crypto investors should follow to protect against them!
Be Alert to Bad Actors
As you are a cryptocurrency investor, bad actors are continuously after your money. Thus, it's important to stay vigilant, follow crypto wallet security best practices, and remember these two golden rules:
The crypto market is not a place to get rich quick.
No one can guarantee a high return on cryptocurrency investments.
However, that doesn't mean the crypto market lacks decent investment opportunities. But when someone approaches you with an offer, you must follow these guidelines to stay safe:
VALR doesn't have any affiliates that provide investment advice, and none of our employees will ever advise you to deposit funds into your account, promise profits, offer you a loan, or trade on your behalf, or promise profits.
If the offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Many bad actors sound and look legitimate, with high-quality websites, testimonials, and materials that are challenging to identify as being counterfeit. They also tend to be financially knowledgeable and very articulate, claiming that their operations are transparent without being completely truthful.
Bad actors may initially send smaller amounts of cryptocurrency to your wallet as proof of return on investment (ROI). However, once you send a larger deposit next time, they will disappear with your funds.
How VALR Keeps Your Crypto Safe
You can protect your VALR account from bad actors by:
Not letting someone else register an account on your behalf.
Not sharing your password or OTP with anyone.
Not allowing access to your devices via screen-sharing software.
Not submitting identification documents or sensitive data to unverified individuals or companies.
Following crypto security best practices, VALR also has multiple measures in place to ensure the safety of your cryptocurrencies, including:
Storing customers' funds in both hot and cold wallets with multi-signature technology.
Strict internal controls, requiring multiple signatures from multiple secure locations to move customers' funds. This prevents any employee (even our CEO) from single-handedly transferring digital assets.
Advanced security measures like 2FA are automatically enabled for all critical transactions.
VALR is a completely reserved crypto trading platform where users can only trade from pre-funded accounts. Keeping all your assets 100% fully reserved significantly decreases counterparty risks and minimises the chances of a loss of funds due to a potential default or insolvency.
Join VALR today – a secure and fully reserved crypto exchange designed to keep your crypto assets safe.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The best security for crypto includes multi-signature cold storage, strict internal controls, two-factor authentication (2FA), and secure account management practices.
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A high level of security for a crypto wallet is ensured by using cold storage with multi-signature technology and enabling two-factor authentication (2FA).
Risk Disclosure
Trading or investing in crypto assets is risky and may result in the loss of capital as the value may fluctuate.
VALR (Pty) Ltd is a licensed financial services provider (FSP #53308).
