The joy of receiving free tokens, apparently from the Uniswap decentralized exchange, was short-lived for the “lucky” winners of the air drop. It is that, when they wanted to exchange them for other cryptocurrencies, in reality —without knowing it— they gave control of their wallets to fraudsters.
Due to the fact, several thefts are reported, specifically of non-fungible tokens (NFT) that were housed in Ethereum wallets of the victims.
“This was an attack by phishing which resulted in some NFTs being taken from people who approved malicious transactions,” explained Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap. The computer clarifies that it was something “totally separate from the protocol”, that is, the security of the exchange was not violated.
This was a good reminder to protect yourself from phishing and not to click on malicious links.
Hayden Adams, founder of Uniswap.
The modus operandi of the scammers was the next. 73,000 addresses were sent a air drop of a token that was called “UniswapLP”. To exchange it for other currencies, victims were offered to go to a certain website. There, the wallet had to be connected to the page, but instead of carrying out the cryptocurrency exchange operation, the fraudsters were given unrestricted access.
It was the Binance exchange research team who detected that this was happening. In the ethereum address attributed to the swindlers it is observed that collected more than USD 70 thousand in ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the network; plus numerous non-fungible tokens reaching an amount That would be more than USD 8 million.
This is not the first time such scams have occurred. As CriptoNoticias reported on several occasions, several airdrops they have been used to steal wallets from Ethereum and other networks. For this reason, it is advisable to be skeptical and always verify in official sources if a platform is really giving free tokens.