First, about the byline
"The BaitPath desk" is a collective byline. It is not an institution and not a registered organisation. Everything here carries that name; there are no individual pen names and no persona of a seasoned insider.
Two reasons. First, we are not going to invent credentials. The standard move is to attach a byline claiming a former exchange risk role or a decade in the industry — claims nobody can verify. On a site about avoiding scams, buying trust with unverifiable assertions is the exact thing it argues against.
Second, the credibility of this site should not rest on who said it but on whether what was said can be independently checked. So each piece points at public sources you can go and read: specification text, published regulator warnings, exchange help pages. You are not asked to trust us. You are given the means to check.
What this site does
It answers one kind of question: is this safe, or am I being scammed.
It is written for people who want to buy or sell crypto through legitimate channels and are worried about getting caught out — those who are afraid of being scammed, those already scammed, and those who want to understand before doing anything. The concentration of real problems sits in a few places: bank accounts flagged after cash-outs, imitation apps and sites, fake support, long-con approaches on social platforms, and wallet signatures and approvals.
Those subjects attract heavy search interest and strong feelings, and existing coverage tends to be one of two kinds: promotional filler, or pure alarm. The third option is what this site is for: calm, sourced, actionable.
Subjects we deliberately stay out of
Not because they are hard, but because every additional subject widens the range of things this site has to be accurate about, and accuracy is its only asset.
Not covered here
- Prices, market commentary and return forecasts. None of it, in any form.
- Coin write-ups and project analysis. We do not assess whether any asset is worth holding.
- Platform comparisons and rankings. The commercial pull on that format overwhelms the judgement too easily.
- News commentary. Timely material needs continuous maintenance; done badly it is worse than not done.
- Naming anyone. We make no finding that a specific company or person is committing fraud — that is a determination with legal meaning. We describe shapes and structural characteristics.
Sourcing standard
Every mechanism described has to be traceable to official documentation or a public specification. Where it cannot be, it does not get stated as fact.
In practice: technical mechanisms cite the specification — address encoding cites the relevant BIPs and EIPs, two-factor cites the public WebAuthn material. Platform-side rules, fees and limits are never written as fixed figures; they are described as "whatever the platform's current page shows", because they change and a written figure is a future error waiting to happen.
Anything touching legal process is written as "depends on your jurisdiction, go by the rules where you are". We do not give legal advice and we promise no outcome, not on releasing an account, not on recovering funds.
Historical events are used only where they are public and settled, always with dates. No unverified reports, and no invented amounts or details. One fabricated case detail would end the credibility of the whole site, and that is not a price worth paying.
About the images
Article covers are programmatically generated geometric compositions; they do not depict any real institution or event. Where a genuine screenshot of a public page is used, it is captioned with the month it was taken and shows no account information. We do not use redacted "account screenshots" as evidence of first-hand testing.
The single test a finished piece has to pass
After reading it, you know what to actually do.
That test exists to counter a specific failure mode. Anti-scam material drifts easily into alarm, because alarm is easy to write and spreads well. But a piece that leaves someone frightened and directionless often does net harm — it pushes people away from legitimate channels toward less transparent ones.
So every piece has to land on concrete actions: what to do first, what to preserve, who to contact, and what never to do. A paragraph that cannot get there is better deleted.
Where the money comes from
This site is funded by an exchange referral share, and that is its only revenue. When a reader registers at Binance using our code, the platform applies its current referral rules. Whether that code gives any trading-fee discount, and at what rate, must be confirmed on Binance's registration page at the time; this site promises no fixed figure.
The rules we hold ourselves to, correspondingly: each language has one native-language sign-up guide carrying a referral link (written as "how to confirm at each step that you are on the real thing"); the home page contains no link out to any exchange, only the code itself; and the pieces on frozen accounts, scams and account takeover contain no sign-up prompt at all — pushing conversion in those contexts is both jarring and corrosive.
The full mechanism, and what we can and cannot promise, is on the disclosure page. Why "the exchange is giving you X% back" does not hold up as a statement is its own case file, with our own arrangement laid out inside it.