As the digital industry has grown recently, cryptocurrency scammers and scammers have intensified their efforts to steal people’s money. With digital assets becoming more and more a part of daily life, cybercriminals are trying new ways to attack victims.
That is why the cryptocurrency wallet service provider, MetaMask, warns the crypto community about a new type of scam model that scammers use to take advantage of ‘user carelessness’.
Using the address poisoning technique, cybercriminals track a user’s transactions and generate a “vanity” wallet address that contains characters similar to the recipient’s actual address in the transaction history. The scammers then transfer $0 worth of tokens via a newly generated address to poison the transaction history. Bad actors hope that users will mistakenly copy the hack address instead of the real one in future transactions.
Crypto vanity addresses are created via a generator. Allows a user to create an address that contains characters similar to another user’s address. The scammers took advantage of the tool to create a wallet ID that resembles the address they are tracking. Notably, the spoof addresses used in this type of crypto scam mostly have the same characters at the beginning and end of a wallet ID.
How to prevent falling prey to tackle the crypto poisoning scam?
When making crypto transactions on a daily basis, most of the users copy the recipient ID from the transaction history. This way, users could send crypto funds to the scammer’s address out of negligence. Once this is done, it is impossible to reverse the transaction. It is better to use an address book when transferring digital assets.
Although cryptocurrency users have become accustomed to copying a long hexadecimal string of transaction history, it is more secure to match every single character of the recipient’s wallet ID during the transfer.
When responding to the community in the Twitter thread, added MetaMask;
MetaMask is self-custodial, so we never have access to the accounts. We try to prevent scammers from harming our users, but we cannot stop everything users may choose to do with their wallets. If you need help: https://support.MetaMask.io – click the blue ‘Start a conversation’ button.
Related Reading: Hong Kong Will Limit Retail Investors’ Crypto Trading To ‘Highly Liquid’ Assets Only
The infrastructure service provider company also published a blog post to spread information and explain how this crypto scam works. While conceding that it is difficult to memorize long hexadecimal numbers, the MetaMask team noted:
You might only see the first batch of characters, or sometimes you might see the leading 5-10 or so and the trailing 5-10 or so, skipping the middle. This is how most people recognize addresses: not by knowing each character, but by becoming familiar with the beginning and end. This is the trend that addresses the poisoning of prey.
Featured image from Pixabay and graphic from TradingView.com
