Over $47 million was stolen from approximately 57,000 crypto users in February by criminals using phishing scams to lure their victims.
According to a report by Scam Sniffer, a Web 3 anti-scam project most of the phishing scams occurred on the Ethereum blockchain with ERC-20 Tokens being the most targeted of all crypto coins.
- “In the thefts, Ethereum mainnet accounts for 78% of the total. The main assets stolen are ERC 20 tokens, accounting for 86%. Most of the thefts of all ERC20 tokens were due to assets being stolen as a result of signing phishing signatures such as Permit, IncreaseAllowance, and Uniswap Permit2.” the report explained.
The report pointed out that crypto users who lost digital funds exceeding $1m were 75% lower in February compared to January.
According to the report, the majority of phishing scams are pulled by fake social media accounts impersonating popular Web 3 projects on X and other social media platforms.
The report revealed that the phishing scammer’s “February 15 haul” of over $6 million was their most successful day and the worst day for crypto users.
The scammers after a successful phishing attack use safe or so-called account abstraction wallets as their token approval spenders. This acts as a wallet to siphon users’ funds.
What you need to know
- Besides Ethereum, the chain with the second-largest loss of user funds according to the report was Arbitrum. The chain witnessed a loss of users’ digital assets worth nearly $3.5 million.
- The BNB chain came in third position with a loss of digital assets worth $2.5m
- Polygon and Optimism round of the top five chains with digital asset losses of approximately $1.8m and $1.4m respectively.
