Address Poisoning Scammer Alert
MetaMask has recently announced an “address poisoning” scam alert to warn all crypto users about this new type of scam. Here is a short article explaining what exactly address poisoning is, so you won’t be the next victim of these scammers.
Scammer’s Methods to “Poison” Your Wallet
Address poisoning takes advantage of crypto users’ wallet address copy-and-paste habits when making transactions. Since crypto wallet addresses are designed in a perplexing manner — with a long and complex combination of numbers and alphabets — users tend to rely on copying and pasting their addresses to transfer funds.
Knowing that the users would only memorize some digits of their wallet addresses, scammers would use a vanity address generator to create a fake dummy wallet address containing the matching first and last couple of digits that closely resembles the victim’s actual address. Then, they would send a transaction of no value to the intended victim’s wallet, “poisoning” your wallet’s transaction history with their fake address.
Who Are the Target?
The main target for address-poisoning scammers is the reckless wallet users who have a high tendency to accidentally copy and paste the scammer’s fake wallet address instead of their own. Because if the user only recognizes the digits at the beginning and the end of their wallet address, they could miss out on checking the other digits in between. As a result, they would send the funds to the scammer, not their intended recipient.
Although the scammers would have to pay the gas fees when making the false transactions, they aim to receive the bigger bucks from their unsuspecting victims — and the sad truth is that on-chain money will not be recoverable, leaving the victims with nothing.
Combating Address Poisoning
The most important step to avoid address poisoning is to double-check whether you copy the right wallet address, ensuring that every single digit belongs to your wallet address. You could also record your wallet address elsewhere in safer places, such as your personal laptop, and copy it from there when needed rather than copying it from your transaction history tab.
According to MetaMask, crypto users are encouraged to use a hardware wallet and do a test transaction as ways to prevent users from falling into this type of fraud.
Read more about address poisoning from MetaMask here: https://metamask.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/11967455819035-Address-poisoning-scams
