Crypto Scammer Gets Away with $1.2M in ARB Tokens-Here’s What Happened

A relatively new sort of cyberattack has been used to steal ARB tokens worth $1.2 million. This type of attack modifies wallet addresses in order to steal funds, and it was carried out by a hacker.

According to the data on the blockchain, one cryptocurrency address has been stealing money from Arbitrum customers. At this point, the attacker has been successful in defrauding over 600 unique cryptocurrency wallets out of a total of more than 930,000 ARB tokens, which at the current exchange rate are worth over $1.2 million.

A day after Arbitrum, a well-known Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution, successfully completed its highly-anticipated airdrop, on March 24, the process of transferring cash got underway. The L2 network is governed by the ARB token, which is the native governance token.

On Arbitrum’s blockchain explorer, the contract that was used to complete the transfers can be found with the creator’s name marked as “Fake Phishing18.” This indicates that users who have lost their tokens should have interacted with the bad contract by clicking a phishing link in order to lose their tokens.

On Twitter, a lot of users of cryptocurrencies have admitted that they are among those who have been affected by the hack. According to the statement of one user, they had “Lost 7250 arb token to the hacker, which is presently worth 10,000$ at the time of tweet.”

The Ethereum smart contract developer Brainsy has also issued a warning in the past about a malicious contract that was created by “Fake Phishing18.” On March 24, they stated that interacting with the contract creates an additional transactions request that looks as though it’s from the sender’s wallet but is actually a phishing attack.

“When I want to send, the fake contract also produces a “transaction” that appears like it’s from my wallet,” they noted at the time. “I guess this is to get me to interact with the contract.”

What exactly is “Address Poisoning,” and why is it becoming more prevalent in today’s society?

This form of hack, which is referred to as “address poisoning” and has recently acquired popularity among hackers, basically takes advantage of user negligence and hurries in order to make money off of them.

With this kind of cyberattack, the target’s cryptocurrency wallet’s address is changed in an attempt by the hacker to steal the wallet’s contents and spend them elsewhere.

At the beginning of the month of January, MetaMask issued a warning that “address poisoning” attacks are becoming more common. Hackers try to use an address that has the same initial and last few characters as the actual transaction “in the hopes that you will not examine the complete address, and instead copy theirs in a future txn,” according to the developer of the Web3 wallet at the time.

According to what MetaMask suggested at the time, you may protect yourself by either double-checking the whole address or making use of the Address Book feature.

On the other hand, an on-chain analyst named Lookonchain has stated that a phony version of the ARB token has generated more than $24,000 in transaction volume on the DEX known as Uniswap. When it comes to trading ARB, the blockchain investigator suggested that the community exercise extreme caution.

The beginning of the claims process for Arbitrum tokens occurred on March 23. As of the time of publication, evidence from Nansen indicates that about 520,000 addresses have successfully claimed roughly one billion ARB tokens. This indicates that just 110,000 addresses, out of a total of 625,143 eligible ones, have not yet claimed their tokens.

CoinMarkCap’s data shows that ARB is presently trading at $1.33, remaining relatively unchanged over the course of the previous day. Yet, in comparison to its all-time high of approximately $11.80, the coin’s price has dropped by almost 90%.

$1.2M in ARB Tokens ARB Tokens Crypto Scammer