How MEOW’s Anti Spam Filters Keep you Safe
My EOS Wallet recently updated its spam filters with big upgrades for users and bad news for scammers.
We’ve been reading stories daily of users being tricked into visiting phishing sites for ECAF or the Telos Foundation and were quickly relieved of their funds by unscrupulous thieves. But what can we do as a community to combat these scams?
Educating users on best practices never hurts but these lessons usually come at a high price, and as others have tested, even tech savvy users can be phished.
Block Explorers
A lot of these phishing scams start with on-chain transactions, and are delivered to users via the platform they trust the most, their wallet or account page on block explorers.
A popular scam these days is to send an eos transfer with the minimum balance and a memo containing a phishing URL to a fake site claiming to be the Telos Foundation or ECAF. Let’s compare how the various block explorers handle one of these transactions:
Bloks (bloks.io)
Using only the default settings on one of the most popular block explorers we can see that not only is this not considered spam, but “Hide Small Balances” which is one of the most basic methods of detecting spam is not selected by default.
EOSX (eosx.io)
In order to view this transaction on EOSx.io you had to disable “Hide Small Amounts” setting which is a good step, spam shouldn’t be viewable by default… There’s a reason emails sort them into the Junk Folder. However for some reason even with their “Hide Spam” option enabled it didn’t seem to catch the suspicious transaction.
MEOW (altshiftdev.com)
MEOW hid the transaction by default! And even when the “Spam Filter” setting was toggled off the transaction was clearly flagged as dangerous. Any user casually scrolling through their history would see this and have no doubt that the URL indicated is not legitimate.
Desktop Wallets
After reviewing a few desktop wallets like EOS Voter & FairyWallet it was clear they don’t provide any transaction filtering features so did not make it on this list. Instead most desktop wallets redirected users to block explorers for viewing transactions.
MEOW is 100% funded by donations from the community, if you’d like to support the site or my work donations to account meow.x are welcome.
altShiftDev is the creator of My EOS Wallet (MEOW), a community owned and ad-free wallet and EOS account viewer on the web. It allows the EOS community to access and manage their EOS accounts with the trusted security of hardware wallets.
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