Attacker Steals $71 Million in an Extremely Sophisticated Phishing Attack That Fooled the Investor

The post Attacker Steals $71 Million in an Extremely Sophisticated Phishing Attack That Fooled the Investor appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News

A WBTC investor falls to a smart phishing scam and the attacker pocketed more than $71 million worth of WBTC. The blockchain security firm CertiK reported that the investor transferred 1,155 WBTC to the hacker’s address on Friday.

The attack advanced the notion of “address poisoning” opening up the gate for the scammers to make vanity addresses that resemble legitimate addresses of high net worth wallets. 

In this case, the transfer history of the victim was breached and the victim was made to send the money to the address belonging to the real exploiter who presented his address as legitimate.

This is how the events unfolded 

The victim first transferred the 0.05 ETH not realizing that this was a trigger to the scammers indicating activity in their wallet and accessing the assets. 

The criminals devised a vanity wallet address imitating the format of the victim’s earlier transfer. The victim fell for the tactic and sent a large sum of WBTC to the crook’s pocket.

Right after the funds were transferred, the exploiter quickly receded the 1,155 WBTC into additional intermediary wallets and then began exchanging WBTC into Wrapped Ether (WETH). Further, he swapped the WBTC for 22,956 Ether and dispersed the funds across 10 different addresses, confusing their trail and adding difficulty to any potential recovery efforts.

Faced with a growing number of phishing attacks and other devious schemes, users need to be especially careful in verifying recipients’ addresses and use caution when transferring money to avoid scams.

Experts issue advice to the users to be careful of fraudulent activity, as well as use effective layers of security to secure their digital resources. 

With the authorities trying to trace and recover the stolen funds, this attack is a vivid depiction of the inbuilt risks linked with cryptocurrency payments and the need to adopt stronger security measures as protection in the future.

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