Is ETCV (Ethereum Classic Vision) a scam or not?

There is quite a bit of FUD about the upcoming Ethereum fork, called Ethereum Classic Vision (exchange token ETCV) being a scam like Ethereum Nowa. This Dutch website for instance tries to give some evidence of this claim.

If ETCV is a scam indeed, the authors sure have done a lot of effort to make it less obvious than with Nowa, whose site has spelling errors and makes ridiculous claims about the forked cryptocurrency. The biggest warning light for Nowa is the procedure to supposedly obtain free ‘ETN’ (which by the way is an already existing token for Electroneum, another fact that makes Nowa extremely suspect). They outright ask you to transfer your ETH to their address and those who are even more gullible than that, can even make it worse by sending them their private keys as well. First rule of cryptocurrencies: never give anyone your private key. Second rule… never give anyone your private key!

The Classic Vision website on the other hand looks a lot more legit. It seems the ‘scam’ claims for ETCV are mainly based on two things:

1. Confusion between the supposed Nowa fork and the ETCV fork. The aforementioned article mentions some facts that appear to originate from the news about Nowa, like the photo models story. This confusion is understandable because the (supposed) dates for these two forks are only 1 day apart.
2. The idea that you are supposed to enter your ETH wallet private key to claim ETCV. There is some truth about this because there are only two ways to view an ETCV wallet on their website: either through a keystore or by directly entering the private key. Even though the latter seems to violate the First Rule, in this embryonic stage of the new currency with no third-party support yet, it makes some sense that these are the only options. Obviously the smarter option is to use the keystore but when following proper crypto hygiene, there is no risk with directly using the PK either as I will explain below.

The other suspect facts mentioned are that the website lacks certain information like the exact block number for the fork (which is true and pretty annoying), or obvious contact information for the authors. I don't know about you but in this day and age no sane person would spread all their personal details on a website. There seem to be enough contact methods albeit not very direct.

Proper Forking Hygiene

This leaves the private key issue as the only big source for concern and until I have actually seen the fork happen, I cannot tell whether this concern is warranted. It is perfectly possible they will indeed use any wallet credentials you enter on their website to plunder your ETH wallet instead of handing you free ETCV. However if you treat the fork as follows, there is zero risk of your ETH being stolen:

1. Create an entirely new ETH wallet using MyEtherWallet or a similar service. You will never use this wallet for anything else than the ETCV claim.
2. Transfer as much ETH to this wallet as you want to be replicated into 3 times the amount of ETCV (as they promise).
3. Leave the ETH on this wallet until you're certain the ETCV fork has happened.
4. Before doing anything else, withdraw all your ETH from the wallet to another wallet.
5. Now claim the ETCV using the wallet address from step 1.

If this is a true fork, what will happen is that the entire ETH chain state is duplicated into the new ETCV branch. This means any existing wallet addresses that exist for ETH at that point will also be valid wallet addresses for ETCV. Anything that happens with ETH after the fork will have no effect on the ETCV branch and vice versa because they each go entirely their own ways. Hence if you withdraw the ETH from your wallet with private key abc123, the ETCV wallet with the same private key will still contain the amount of coin that existed at the time of the fork (which in this case will be multiplied by 3). And of course if the whole thing was a scam after all and someone obtains your private key after you have emptied your ETH wallet, they cannot steal anything.

Update: It's (Most Likely) a Scam Alright!

Now the fork is supposed to have been performed, how do things look? Pretty bad:

• Their website has been suspended
• Before the site disappeared, a highly suspect prompt was added to it to ‘buy’ ETCV by sending ETH directly to a certain address. This prompt contained conflicting information that the ratio of obtained ETCV would be both 50:1 and 1:1. This looks just like a desperate attempt to grab some more ETH before their whole façade collapses.
• Their wallet site is suspended
• Their twitter account is suspended
• News articles about ETCV being a scam are popping up

Although all this is not 100% irrefutable evidence that it's a scam, let's say it is 99.9% evidence. I have to hand it to them, they were a lot more crafty than the Nowa people. They did a lot more effort to make their scheme appear legit. On BitcoinTalk they managed to gather a considerable following and it seems there still are some believers at this moment.

However, I have lost nothing because I have followed the above procedure even though I haven't executed the last step. I'll keep the wallet address just in case we are in that 0.1% and ETCV exists after all, but I don't hold my hopes up high.