- Pink Drainer lost 10 ETH ($30,000) in an address poisoning scam that exploited address similarity.
- The attackers tricked Pink Drainer into sending funds by imitating his wallet address.
- The attack came days after Pink Drainer announced it was shutting down operations.
Surprisingly, the infamous cryptocurrency wallet leaking group Pink Drainer fell for an address poisoning scam and lost 10 ETH, worth around $30,000.
The attack was flagged by cryptocurrency compliance platform MistTrack via a July 7 post.
What happen?
Address poisoning scams exploit the similarity between legitimate wallet addresses and fraudulent wallet addresses.
In this case, the attacker sent a small amount of cryptocurrency from a wallet with an address very similar to that of the Pink Drainer.
The goal was to trick Pink Drainer into accidentally sending funds to the wrong address.
MistTrack explains that scammers often manipulate a few characters at the beginning or end of an address to make it look similar to the target’s actual address.
MistTrack explained how scammers use bots to monitor transactions and identify opportunities, mimicking parts of legitimate addresses, increasing the likelihood that victims will mistakenly send funds to a fraudulent address instead of the intended one.
In the case of Pink Drainer, the subtle similarities between the fake address and the legitimate address were enough for the group to trick the recipient into sending 10 ETH.
Pink Rainer has announced that they will be suspending their activities.
According to data from Dune Analytics, the incident comes shortly after Pink Drainer announced it was ceasing operations after achieving its goal of stealing over $85 million worth of cryptocurrency assets by July 2023.
Although Pink Drainer has ceased operations, the prevalence of similar wallet money laundering groups such as Angel Drainer, Push Drainer, and Venom Drainer shows that there is an ongoing threat to the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Address pollution scams highlight the importance of being vigilant and following security best practices, such as taking care when processing transactions by verifying the accuracy of recipient addresses before transferring funds.