- ScamSniffer reports a loss of over $55 million in phishing scams across EVM chains in January 2024.
- Ethereum witnessed the highest thefts, followed by Arbitrum, BNB, Optmism, and Polygon.
- The scammers created around 11,000 phishing sites, and 40,000 users were victimized.
According to ScamSniffer’s recent report, phishing scams in January 2024 stole more than $55 million across EVM chains. With almost 11,000 newly created phishing sites, around 40,000 users were victimized, resulting in a massive $17 million loss for the top 7 victims.
According to Dune Analytics, there had been a theft peak almost every few days, spiked by airdrops and popular project events. Reflecting on the theft trend in question, ScamSniffer advised the community to exercise extra caution these days.
These scammers created more than 11K phishing sites, including 8 active Wallet Drainers. In addition, they impersonated various projects, including Manta Network, Opensea, Frame, AltLayer, SatoshiVM, Dymension, zkSync, Pyth, Optimism, Blast, and others.
One of the ways in which the users were trapped in the scam was through comments on impersonated X accounts. Ignorant of the scam, the victims were lured into signing the phishing transactions through Phishing signatures like “ERC20 Permit” or “increaseAllowance.” Utilizing Create2, Wallet Drainers generated temporary addresses for each malicious signature.
While almost all the EVM chains including were targeted by the scammers, Ethereum bore the highest losses, followed by Arbitrum, BNB, Optmism, and Polygon. The top victim, 0x1749ad951fb612b42dc105944da86c362a783487, lost $4.70 million, with the other 6 top victims losing around $1.4 million and $2.6 million.
In related news, the analytics firm Chainalysis shed light on the substantial decline in crypto thefts and scams in 2023, decreasing nearly to one-third of 2022’s thefts. In addition, the platform also identified the attackers’ shift from the use of Bitcoin to stablecoins in illicit transactions.
In a subsequent post, the analytics platform pointed out a significant decline of around 54% in stolen funds in 2023. The amount plummeted from $3.7 billion in 2022 to $1.7 billion in 2023.
