A new scam campaign that is gaining traction right now might be way more dangerous than trivial “double-your-deposit” airdrops and fake reward distributions from Elon Musk. Malefactors are exploring “fear of missing out,” offering victims to check how much they would have earned if they were “diamond hands.”
SHIB holders yet again attacked by scammers
In early December 2023, scammers launched a number of websites that allegedly demonstrate the potential PnL of this or that Shiba Inu (SHIB) holder. Such websites are promoted as instruments to check potential benefits from the enormous volatility of some coins.
On a plenty of websites created by the same scammer group (their domain names are slightly different or created with homoglyphs), users are asked to authorize their on-chain wallets. On social media, bots are spreading screenshots with eye-catching hundreds of millions of “paper PnL.”
Needless to say, once a holder authorizes their wallet on the website, they might lose all of their funds in the blink of an eye.
Two aspects of this scam campaign make it more dangerous. First, it is promoted via official X advertising channels: Crypto enthusiasts see it with an “Ad” label in their newsfeeds.
Second, besides using bots, malefactors are leveraging hundreds of hacked accounts: They likely belonged to real people who had never shared anything about cryptocurrency before being hacked.
Fortunately, some of the websites of the malefactors have already been flagged by teams of the largest wallets, including MetaMask and Phantom.
Who else is at risk?
As such, mainstream browsers block users from visiting these websites.
Largely, the scammers are focused on meme coin holders: Announcements for PEPE, BOB, DOGE, GROK and other memetic cryptocurrencies were registered on X.
However, some DeFi coins, including the likes of Uniswap’s UNI and Convex Finance’s CVX, are also used in scam advertising.
The Shiba Inu (SHIB) price is sitting at $0.000008414, being 2% up in the last 24 hours.
