Unethical hackers have been troubling the broader finance market for the past few years but their crackdowns on the crypto market have specifically surged in the past 2 – 3 years. The tricks and processes followed by victim users have also evolved with the passing of time and nowadays poisoning crypto wallet scams is becoming destructive.
In a most recent development, Chainalysis, a blockchain intelligence and analysis firm has discovered 82K wallets linked to the ones behind the poisoning crypto wallet scam. A staggering loss of $57,000 was reported in the past 24 hours due to a malicious address copied from transaction history.
The report notes “The address poisoning scam targeted more experienced users with higher wallet balances compared to the typical wallet holder. A total of 2,774 addresses sent funds (totaling $69,720,993) to the aforementioned 82,031 addresses, representing the victim pool for this campaign.”
Almost every day a cybercrime related to cryptocurrencies is discovered and from the beginning of 2024 till September 2024 the global digital asset market has lost over $1.30 billion in cryptocurrencies.
In the same report, the firm noted that the scammer who buys such poisoning tool kits are easily available on the darknet marketplace, they are among the highly advertised on such marketplaces.
Scams that Pulled the Market Downward
From the year beginning till date, scam techniques such as pig butchering, poisoning wallet techniques, social engineering techniques, and others have troubled several known projects of the crypto market resulting in severe losses.
The India-based centralized cryptocurrency exchange was hacked for over $230 million in cryptocurrencies. Similarly, another exchange Indodax was wiped out for massive amounts of crypto.
Ronin Bridge, Radiant Capital, BingX, and Kraken are some major victims of unethical hackers; they collectively lost more than $100 million.
On September 26, 2024, Onyx Protocol, a decentralized lending platform and Compound Finance fork, fell victim to a preventable hack, resulting in a staggering loss of $3.8 million.
A similar incident was reported by Todayq on August 07, 2024, in which Nexera blockchain suffered a hack resulting in a wipeout of $1.8 Million. Following the breach the NXRA token list over 30% of its trading price reached near lows of past 52 weeks.
Despite severe losses and incidents, the crypto market continues to grow and as of writing the global market capitalization was $2.32 trillion surging over 3.20% in the past 30 days.
However, Bitcoin also remains above the mark of profitability as it registered its all-time high in the first quarter of 2024, and in YTD its prices grew 59.19 percent reaching $67,300 as of writing.
Not only Bitcoin but Ethereum also remains on the bullish path trading at $2,536 adding 10.72% year to date. It is worth noting that rather than growth in the long-term time frame, its price fell 4.55% in 30 days and over 20 percent in a quarter.
