TL;DR - The easiest way to avoid this scam is to get a reliable form of Adblock, but it is helpful to be aware of this scam to save your friends from it. All front-facing parts of this scam seemed very legit and easy to fall for, but it turns out the scam goes much deeper than sending crypto to an exchange you can't recover funds from.

I found an exchange. Let's call it "CeilingCrypto." The website looked very legit with its own branding and color scheme and no "wonky" English. It looked nothing like your typical scam website. The only thing that really stood out is that it was offering 9% ROI on "investments" like Bitcoin and Ethereum. BIG RED FLAG. A brief aside - It also featured many different crypto trading pairs on the main page. The website even offered users to KYC - don't do this with an un-established exchange because then your identity can get stolen.

Let's talk about how I found CeilingCrypto: I was just binging YouTube videos, then I saw an ad for a YouTube-promoted video above the YouTube side bar of the video I was watching. I saw ads for promoted videos like this one dozens of times before. But I was just like, "Let's see what this is. I know the thumbnail is bull shit, but let's see what the deal is here." I view everything with an objective lens. The guy in the video was an American or Canadian guy (judging by accent) with a beard. To me, it is not clear if someone paid him money to make a video on Fiverr or if he was a legit YouTuber that was being paid to make short videos (less than 5 minutes in length), or if he was in on the scam (I believe this is the least likely scenario).

So I search for "CeilingCrypto scam" on Google, and YouTube. I found a copy-cat website of CeilingCrypto on Google which was clearly a scam, asking people for their private keys and in return any funds would be returned to the wallet owner (oldest scam in the book) in buggy English. One of the first videos on YouTube I found is the dude in the paragraph above, but all of the results after that first video became the real "scamception." Every single video uploaded was a robot voice with stock photos or stock videos of corporate professionals or lawyers passing documents around and smiling. Each video had an AI-generated voice / robot-generated voice encouraging users to go to websites that can help people recover any crypto that was deposited to "CeilingCrypto." Needless to say, all of those websites are complete scams - they tell you to send some crypto to assist with taking "legal action" or "bargain" with the scammers and get them to return the crypto. It's impossible to identify whether or not this is a network of scammers colluding or if they are all scammers competing with each other, or a mix of something in between.

Stay safe, not your keys, not your crypto.