Recently, a trader of the PEPE coin meme became the victim of a phishing attack and lost $453,300 worth of assets. Phishing attack is a form of cyber attack in which an attacker masquerades as a reputable organization to trick users into providing personal information and thereby steal the victim’s assets.
In this case, the scammer made two transactions and withdrew more than 356 billion PEPE tokens from the victim’s address 0x9ea22. The scammer’s addresses are 0xfb4d3 and 0xfd178 and are linked to Inferno Drainer, an illegal service provider. According to Scam Sniffer, this service provider has been implicated in multiple cross-chain scams and typically charges 20% for stolen assets.
Data from Dune Analytics shows that scammers have stolen over $7 million worth of assets from over 5000 victims. They have created around 700 Phishing sites since March 27, targeting various prominent projects.
Another user said that they were scammed out of 2.7 billion PEPE with the same trick and are now looking for a way to get this asset back.
Another scammer took $2.3 million from 880 victims
An attacker with the alias Pink Drainer carried out an attack that hacked the Twitter account of Mira Murati, the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI. The attacker stole about 110,000 USD and used it to promote a fake scam.
According to data analyzed by Dune, a company specializing in cybersecurity analysis, Pink Drainer has successfully “set traps” for up to 880 victims and earned up to $2.3 million. The attacker gained access to several crypto wallets through creating fake links. He then stole ERC-20, ETH, and NFT tokens from his victims.
The Pink Drainer attacker made another attack on Orbiter Finance’s Discord server on June 1. In this attack, he stole up to 213,000 USD from the victims. Previously, this criminal group was behind the attack that faked a tweet citing the account “eth_ben”. During that time, the attacker successfully “trapped” 484 victims.
According to a report from Scam Sniffer, an organization that monitors phishing activities, attackers have developed a large number of fake websites. In the past two months, he has created more than 85 websites to scam users. This shows the level of activity and sophistication of the attacker in developing new tools and tactics to carry out malicious acts.
The biggest victim so far is a user who was scammed with NFTs worth $297,000, which included 8 Otherside Koda, 1 Bored Ape, 1 Mutant Ape and 11 Otherdeeds.
Attackers target coin meme
Currently, the proliferation of scam service providers has increased the sophistication of phishing attacks in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In May, several scam gangs created dozens of fake tokens, mimicking popular coin memes. A review from Peckshield says:
“They pushed the price of these fake tokens to an incredible amount to attract a large number of investors, then they disappeared with the investment of the investors.”
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