Analysts at Rip-off Sniffer say unhealthy actors stole $55 million value of crypto and created over 11,000 phishing web sites in January alone.
In an X thread on Feb. 9, Rip-off Sniffer revealed a pattern noticed in January, noting an increase in phishing assaults coinciding with heightened exercise inside crypto communities following a sequence of airdrops within the earlier month.
Based on the info, scammers created over 11,400 phishing web sites in January, impersonating Manta Community, Body, SatoshiVM, AltLayer, Dymension, zkSync, Pyth, OpenSea, Optimism, Blast, and others. Apparently, their efforts paid off as cybercriminals pilfered almost $55 million value of crypto throughout Ethereum Digital Machine-based networks, with the highest seven victims shedding $17 million.
“Nearly all of the thefts occurred on the Ethereum mainnet, adopted by Arbitrum, BNB, Optimism, and Polygon.”
Rip-off Sniffer
As per Rip-off Sniffer, a typical methodology employed by hackers concerned exploiting the ERC-20 Allow perform, deceiving customers into unwittingly transferring funds from their non-custodial wallets underneath the guise of legit operations.
Moreover, perpetrators more and more leveraged the increaseAllowance perform, enabling them to control token allowances granted to malicious good contracts. Many individuals fell for scams as a result of cybercriminals have been actively posting faux feedback on X pretending to be actual tasks like Optimism and zKSync, underscoring the persistent menace posed by fraudulent on-line presences.
As crypto.information beforehand reported, illicit crypto addresses acquired over $24 billion value of crypto in 2023, down from an estimated $39.6 billion in 2022. Based on Chainalysis knowledge, there was a transition within the sorts of belongings concerned in crypto crime, with stablecoins now constituting the vast majority of illicit transaction quantity.