Ethereum update: Etherscanner.app – official thread and my sincere apologies
Hi guys!
First of all, let me introduce myself – I’m Mike Raitsyn and I am the developer of [Etherscanner.app](https://Etherscanner.app)
And I don’t have enough words to say how sorry I am about the way you may already heard about my app:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/978fe3/beware_of_etherscannerapp_probably_scam/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/978fe3/beware_of_etherscannerapp_probably_scam/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/977tbf/play_store_app_etherscanner_will_likely_steal_any/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/977tbf/play_store_app_etherscanner_will_likely_steal_any/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/977r00/etherscannerapp_is_this_legit/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/977r00/etherscannerapp_is_this_legit/)
​
That is what happens when you say “Yes” to a lucrative marketing offer.
But first things first, I’ll tell the whole story.
​
I work at [SnowFox.tech](https://SnowFox.tech), it’s a small (20+) software development company that is building various solutions for blockchain start-ups, mostly ICOs. KYC checks, payment processing, dashboards etc. A lot of fun, especially fighting hackers, interesting clients (and much more fishy “wanna-be-clients”). Company is based in Dubai, Moscow and London (I’m personally in London, so feel free to reach me here, will be glad to have a pint or two).
As many of you I participated in numerous (mostly shitty) ICOs, got some tokens as a bounty reward or as a gratitude from SnowFox’s clients. So I have like 3 wallets with more than 50 different tokens and counting. To make things complicated there is no official app for [Etherscan.io](https://Etherscan.io) and to monitor your wallets in a **safe** way you probably can create several bookmarks with etherscan and refresh them occasionally. That’s why I made Etherscanne app – just to keep an eye on my wallets and get notifications from exchange when my withdrawals are finally made.
​
Now to the spam PMs many of you have received.
Several weeks ago I was approached by a guy who offers me marketing for my app. I’m getting a lot of such emails and PMs on Linkedin, however this guy was quite persuasive and to my surprise have agreed to get paid only for installs. Get a 1000 users for a grand to test out the app – that sounded like a bargain and I agreed and made a pre-payment. Little did I know.
It took a while for me to realise that installs will be get from Reddit and the way they will be get. I don’t know the scale of this “campaign” and the number of redditors who received the spam messages. I feel really bad about it and I want to emphasise that I would never agree it.
I feel the best way is to be transparent about the situation and explain everything. Hope you won’t hold a grudge.
​
Regarding the [Etherscanner.app](https://Etherscanner.app) itself – it asks only for **public keys** of your ETH or BTC wallets, it’s not a wallet app, it has no power to send or sign transactions, the only function is has is to notify you about every transaction made from or to added wallets. I will open the code on github so everyone can double check, however on iOS it’s pretty obvious because of the sandboxing and to be franc it takes some balls to store the private keys on the android phone (better use hardware wallet for this).
Again: Etherscanner **doesn’t have access to your wallet**. It doesn’t even ask you to prove it’s **your** wallet – the whole idea is that you can add any wallet, yours or your friend or ICO public wallet or the wallet of the merchant you are sending crypto to buy staff.
I use it to monitor my token wallets, withdrawals from exchanges and sometimes BTC payments I made to someone. The app is 100% free, there is no email spam (you can really burned for spamming in EU) and it just works.
​
Again, accept my apologies and I do hope that this post will clarify the situation.
I’m open for any ideas and suggestions regarding the app as well.
About Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.
Author: mrajtsin
Score: 16
Don’t forget to share the post if you love it !
