Scammers pretend to be inexperienced cryptocurrency users and post seed phrases online for wallets that they believe are full of funds. This plan is a trap. When someone else tries to access your wallet to steal your funds, scammers take advantage of their attempts to steal your cryptocurrency instead.
“Scammers have invented a new tactic: They use newly created accounts to post cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases in YouTube comments,” Mikhail Sytnik, an analyst at cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, said in a Dec. 23 blog post.
Researchers discovered a comment from a user on a finance video asking how to transfer Tether (USDT) from one cryptocurrency wallet to another, which shared a seed phrase.
The wallet seen by Sytnik contained approximately $8,000 USDT from the Tron network as bait. A thief looking to move USDT must first send a small amount of Tron (TRX), the blockchain’s native token, to a bait wallet to pay network fees.
When a would-be thief transfers TRX to a bait wallet for a fee, that TRX is immediately transferred to another wallet controlled by the fraudster. This is because the decoy wallet is set up as a multi-signature wallet that requires multiple approvals for outgoing transactions.
“Approving transactions leaving these wallets requires the approval of more than one person,” Sytnik explained. “Therefore, transferring USDT to a personal wallet will not work. Even after paying the ‘fee’.”
“In this scenario, the fraudsters are like a digital Robinhood in that they primarily target other crooked individuals.”
A list of transactions detailing the fraudster’s income. source: kaspersky
The researchers advised people to never try to access someone else’s cryptocurrency wallet, even if given a seed phrase, and to be wary of claims about cryptocurrency from strangers online.
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Scammers trying to trick other scammers are nothing new in the cryptocurrency industry.
Last July, Kaspersky revealed a more sophisticated scam that targeted greedy individuals and lured them through links to legitimate cryptocurrency exchanges on Telegram and traps disguised as exposed files that could be exploited.
This longer scam aimed to install malware that could steal even more data and assets from victims’ computers.
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