Since the digital industry has developed recently, scammers and crypto fraudsters have been making efforts to steal people’s money. With digital assets becoming more and more a part of our daily lives, cybercriminals are trying new ways to target their victims.
This is why the cryptocurrency wallet service provider, MetaMask, remind crypto community about a new type of fraud model used to take advantage of ‘user carelessness’.
With address poisoning techniques, cybercriminals track user transactions and generate “prank” wallet addresses that contain the same characters as real recipient addresses in transaction history. Then, the fraudster transfers $0 tokens through the newly created address to poison the transaction history. Bad actors hope users mistakenly copy the hacked address instead of the original one in future transactions.
Vanity Crypto addresses are generated through a generator. This allows users to create addresses that contain the same characters as other users’ addresses. Scammers take advantage of tools to create wallet ids that look similar to tracked addresses. In particular, the copycat addresses used in this type of crypto fraud mainly have the same characters at the beginning and end of the wallet id.
How To Prevent The Season To Overcome Poisonous Crypto Scams?
When doing daily crypto transactions, most users copy the recipient id from their transaction history. In this way, users can send crypto funds to the scammer’s address without noticing. Once completed, it is not possible to reverse the transaction. It is best to use an address book when transferring digital assets.
Although crypto users are already in the habit of copying long hexadecimal strings from their transaction history, it is safer to match each character of the recipient’s wallet id when transferring.
When responding to the community Twitter thread, MetaMask added;
MetaMask is our own custodian, so we don’t have access to your account. We try to prevent scammers from harming our users, but we can not stop all users can choose to do with the wallet. If you need help: https://support.MetaMask.io – click the blue ‘Start Chat’ button.
Related reading: Hong Kong to Restrict Retail Investors’ Crypto Trading to Only ‘Very Liquid’ Assets
The infrastructure service provider company also published a blog post to spread awareness and explain how this crypto scam works. While admitting that it is difficult to remember long hexadecimal numbers, the MetaMask team notes:
You may see most of the first characters only, or sometimes you may see the beginning 5-10 or so and the last 5-10 or so, skip the middle. This is how many people recognize the address: not by knowing each character, but by becoming familiar with the beginning and end. This is a tendency that overcomes the toxicity of winter.
Option images from Pixabay and charts from TradingView.com