Some lost millions trying to claim $ 2K Crypto Airdrop

Airdrops can be the most confusing facet of crypto. With reference to tokens that are rewarded to crypto traders who meet certain criteria, they often amount to free money. The amounts that fall can be huge. In April, Bored Ape Yacht Club owners received a cryptocurrency airdrop worth around $ 100,000 for each monkey nft they owned.

Sometimes air drops that sound too good to be true are actually legitimate. But not always.

On Monday, scammers earned $ 8 million in bitcoin and ether after using a phishing scheme. The scam centered on Uniswap, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange where people trade altcoins such as shiba inu and lavanche. The scammers promised a free airdrop of 400 Uniswap tokens, worth around $ 2000. A few traders took the bait – linked the wallet to a dubious website – and two victims suffered heavy losses.

More than $ 6.5 million was dropped from one wallet, blockchain analysis firm PeckShield told CNET. Scammers took 2444 ether ($ 2.46 million) and 201 bitcoin ($ 3.96 million) from that wallet. The second wallet lost 834 ether ($ 903,000) and 39 bitcoin ($ 774,000). PeckShield told CNET that there are four more wallets infected by the phishing attack, but that these have not yet been tapped.

As obvious as the fraud may seem, it is rooted in precedent. In 2020, Uniswap sent an airdrop of $ 400 UNI tokens (now worth $ 2,224) to every wallet that had traded on the platform. Crypto whales at a number of points in 2021 received air droplets worth five and even six digits.

Uniswap is a central institution for decentralized finance, or “DeFi”, as it allows players to trade cryptocurrencies through peer-to-peer technology, and avoids authority structures that manage typical exchanges such as Binance and FTX. “To be clear: there was no exploitation,” the company said in a statement on Twitter. “The protocol has always been – and still is – secure … airdrops that lead you to unofficial domains are likely phishing attempts. We will never send users without notice on multiple official channels.”

While cryptocurrencies have taken a dive in recent months – bitcoin and ether are down 51% and 65% respectively during the last six months – the fraudulent activity has not given in. Hackers dropped $ 1.4 million worth of ether from an NFT lending platform on Sunday, which followed $ 100,000 taken from the NIX market Quixotic at the end of June. In between these two incidents, a hacker stole around $ 8.8 million from Cream Finance, however eventually returned $ 7.1 million of it.

Monday’s scams targeting Uniswap liquidity providers; users who earn interest by depositing cryptocurrency in Uniswap’s system. There are around 230,000 liquidity providers; the bad actors sent fake Uniswap tokens to at least 74,800 of them, according to blockchain security researcher Harry Denley. The name of the malicious token led the victims to a website where they could exchange the new tokens for other cryptocurrencies. Clicking on the link on this site led to infection and drainage of the two wallets.

Sending all the fake tokens cost the scammers $ 9,042 (8.5 ether), Denley said. The lost crypto was first reported as a hack by Uniswap, whose cryptocurrency has a market value of $ 4 billion, before it was discovered to be a socially developed scam.