Fraudsters send custom tokens to the owners of cryptocurrency wallets and lure them to phishing sites created with the sole purpose of stealing cryptocurrency from these very wallets.

One of the first to draw attention to the problem was the developer of Solidity (the programming language for Ethereum self-executing contracts) under the pseudonym Shegenerates. Last week, she tweeted that someone had sent her tokens supposedly worth $ 30,000, but in reality everything turned out to be a hoax.

As Shegenerates told Motherboard, the fraudulent scheme is as follows: useless tokens are sent to the victim, which he cannot but accept due to the nature of the blockchain. A free distribution of tokens or coins is called an airdrop and is often used by developers of new cryptocurrencies to attract audiences. The name of the tokens received by Shegenerates contained the domain name, which is very strange. According to the developer, the site turned out to be phishing – it asked users for permission to access their MetaMask cryptocurrency wallets. If the victim gave permission, the scammers would withdraw all funds from the wallet.

With the rise in the rate of cryptocurrencies throughout 2021, scammers have expanded the list of their victims, and now they are targeting not only exchanges and organizations, but also individuals who have bitcoins, ether and other coins or tokens.

“We are seeing an increase in phishing scams aimed at gaining control over users’ web wallets. This scheme is new, as tokens are sent to people and then sent to the site of a supposedly decentralized exchange. Fraudsters lure them to a website where they can allegedly sell the received tokens, but in fact they steal the entire contents of the wallets, “said Tom Robinson, an analyst at Elliptic.