Someone Lost $6.5M Trying to Claim $2K of ‘Free’ Crypto

The most confusing aspect of crypto is airdrops. These tokens are often referred to as free money and are awarded to crypto traders who meet certain criteria. These amounts can be huge. For every ape NFT they had Bored Ape Yacht Club owners received an April cryptocurrency airdrop of around $100,000.

Airdrops that sound too good be true sometimes are legitimate. Not always.

After using phishing, scammers took $8 million in bitcoins and ether on Monday. The scam was centered around Uniswap. This is a decentralized crypto-exchange where users trade altcoins such as shiba Inu and avalanche. Scammers offered to airdrop 400 Uniswap tokens for free, which was worth approximately $2,000. Two victims suffered huge losses when two traders fell for the lure of the scammers, who promised a free airdrop of 400 Uniswap tokens worth around $2,000.

CNET reported that more than $6.5 million was taken from one wallet by PeckShield, a blockchain analytics firm. Scammers stole 2,444 Ethereum ($2.46 Million) and 201 Bitcoin ($3.96 Million) from this wallet. Another wallet was hacked and took 834 ether ($903,000), 39 bitcoin ($774,000) from that wallet. CNET was informed by PeckShield that four additional wallets were infected with the phishing attack. However, these wallets have not yet been drained.

The scam is as obvious as it may sound, but it has a history. Uniswap gave 400 $UNI tokens to all wallets that traded on its platform in 2020. This was worth $2,224. Numerous crypto whales received airdrops at various points in 2021, including five , , and even six-figure.

Uniswap, also known as Decentralized Finance Institution, is a central institution that allows users to trade cryptocurrency via peer-to-peer technology. It avoids the authority structures that control exchanges such as Binance or FTX. In a Twitter statement, the company stated that there was no exploit.

“The Protocol was always — and still is — secure… Airdrops that point you to unofficial domains may be phishing attempts. We will never airdrop users without notifying them via multiple channels.

1/ Yesterday some Uniswap LPs fell for a phishing scheme, a problem that is far too common in crypto today. It was not exploited, to be precise. The Protocol was and is secure. Here’s what actually happened.

– Uniswap Labs, (@Uniswap). July 12, 2022

 

Although crypto prices have fallen in recent months ether and bitcoin are down 51% and 65%, respectively over six months, scamming activity isn’t slowing down. On Sunday , hackers took $1.4 million of ether from an online NFT lending platform. This was in addition to $100,000 stolen from Quixotic at June‘s end. Between those two incidents, a hacker took around $8.8million from Cream Finance. returned $7.1 million of that.

Monday’s scammer targeted Uniswap liquidity provider; users who earn interest depositing cryptocurrency into Uniswap’s system. According to Harry Denley , there are approximately 230,000 liquidity providers. The bad actors sent fake Uniswap coins to at least 74 800 of them. The malicious token’s name led victims to a website that allowed them to exchange their new tokens for other cryptocurrency. These wallets were infected and drained by clicking the link.

Denley stated that the scammers spent $9,042 (8.5 Ethereum) sending all these fake tokens. The loss of crypto was initially reported by Denley as a hack on Uniswap. Their cryptocurrency has a market capital of $4 billion. However, it was later discovered that it was a socially engineered fraud.