In the past 24 hours, almost 700 ETH which translates to around $1 Million, has been siphoned off by the notorious scammer, “Monkey Drainer”. Two of the largest victims of this scam were wallets ending with 0x02a and 0x626, which conjointly lost around $370,000. While most considered it to be a hack, it was eventually found to be a phishing attack, used against vulnerable users holding crypto & NFTs in their wallets.
Phishing Attack
One of the victims has reportedly lost 1 BAYC, 1 CloneX, 36,400 USDC & 12 other NFTs, which brings the total loss to about $150,000. The other victim has lost around $220,000 which includes cryptos like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether & famous sport NFTs. This attack was carried out by sending malicious links inside emails & by creating duplicate web portals that mimicked the look of the original websites. It then tricked users into connecting their wallets & signing off crypto transactions.
However, a few such transactions got rejected by the network, after the scammer’s wallet got reported & blacklisted. One can see the Chainabuse report here. After the news broke, the team behind Monkey Drainer, used automated bots to spam the comment section of almost every crypto-related post on Twitter. And, it’s still quite not clear if the
spammer has access to other wallets, so new devious transactions may still appear on the network in the future. At the time of composing this news article, Monkey Drainer still holds the majority of the stolen funds in their wallet balance.
Too Late To Recover
A self-proclaimed crypto detective who goes by the name ZackXBT on Twitter, was the first to uncover this phishing attack. But by that time, it was quite late as the exploiters stole nearly a million dollars in crypto & NFTs combined.
“Over the past 24 hours 700 ETH ($1m) has been stolen by the phishing scammer known as Monkey Drainer. They recently surpassed 7300 transactions from their drainer wallet after being around for only a few months.”
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The year 2022 has been quite unfortunate for the crypto market as this is not the first time such an attack has been orchestrated by using malicious links & phishing websites. From Actor Seth Green’s BAYC NFTs being stolen to Discord servers of prominent NFT projects getting compromised — the Monkey Drainer scam just adds to the ever-growing list of phishing scams in crypto.
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