A suspected phishing scammer utilizing the alias Monkey Drainer reportedly stole round $1 million price of Ether (ETH) this week by way of doubtful non-fungible token (NFT) copycat web sites.
Nicely-known blockchain snoop ZachXBT was among the many first to trace and spotlight the exercise, stating on Oct. 26:
“Within the final 24 hours, ~700 ETH ($1 million) was stolen by the phishing rip-off known as Monkey Drainer. They just lately surpassed 7300 transactions from their drainer pockets after just some months of deployment.”
“The highest two victims over the previous day embrace 0x02a and 0x626, who collectively misplaced $370,000 by signing transactions on malicious phishing websites,” added ZachXBT.
The blockchain fraud investigator additionally claimed that longer-term, Monkey Drainer allegedly stole greater than $3.5 million from their schemes, with “this quantity growing quickly by the day.”
6/ Please be further cautious earlier than visiting unknown web sites, connecting your pockets and signing transactions.
I am nonetheless on trip for a few week however needed to publish this put up because it blew up my bot notifications.
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) October 25, 2022
Phishing scams usually contain criminals sharing hyperlinks to web sites posing as real initiatives or corporations that purpose to trick victims into handing over personal credentials by providing an thrilling shopping for alternative or free promoting.
Particularly, 4 addresses associated to Monkey Drainer have been flagged, together with the deal with monkey-drainer.eth.
Looking these addresses on the blockchain community-powered Web3 safety community Chainabuse at present brings up an extended checklist of experiences of airdrop scams, NFT scams, and phishing assaults.
Reported incidents embrace airdrop scams by way of the Astrobot Society Discord channel, a pretend Wolfsspiel and Bored Ape Yacht Membership market, and a pretend Aptos airdrop to call a number of.
The Web3 safety neighborhood Pockets Guard additionally responded to ZachXBT’s Twitter thread, stating that they “found a number of different just lately created mint websites” that had Monkey Drainers within the backend, together with a pretend whitelist hyperlink from Rubbish Associates, which was a phishing website.
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ZachXBT has grown into a good impartial blockchain investigator over the previous couple of years and has uncovered a variety of nefarious conduct in area.
Earlier this month, deputy head of France’s nationwide cyber unit, Christophe Durand, even cited ZachXBT’s work to assist officers monitor down phishing scams by 5 individuals suspected of carrying $2.5 million in NFTs to have stolen.