The infamous purse-snatching group the Pink Drainers have fallen for the “address poisoning” scam and are now up to their own tricks.
Cryptocurrency compliance platform MistTrack highlighted the attack in a post on X on July 7, saying the hacking group lost 10 Ether (ETH) to fake wallet addresses in late June as a result of the scam. That’s equivalent to about $30,000 in today’s dollars.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, MistTrack explained that address poisoning scams occur when attackers send small amounts of cryptocurrency from a wallet with a similar address to one of the target’s regular wallets, tricking the target into accidentally sending funds to the wrong wallet.
“Scammers have bots that look for new transactions. Since they can’t decipher the code of the entire address, they can just change the first and last few letters to look similar to an address they’re using,” MistTrack said.
“So the scammer is hoping that the victim will (copy) the fraudulent address instead of the original one,” they added.
Related: Angel Drainer targets users with malicious Safe contracts, stealing $403,000
In this case, the attacker sent funds from a wallet address with an identifier that was nearly identical to Pink Drainer’s previous wallet, successfully tricking Pink Drainer into accidentally sending a total of 10 ETH to the fake address.
The decision comes just over a month after Pink Drainer made a surprise announcement on May 17 that it was shutting down its service after achieving its goal of stealing over $85 million in cryptocurrency assets.
According to data from Dune Analytics, the Pink Drainer has stolen $85.3 million worth of cryptocurrency since July 2023.
Although Pink Drainer has ceased operations, there are several other drainer toolkit services that help nefarious actors steal crypto assets, including Angel Drainer, Pussy Drainer, and Venom Drainer.
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