Losses from crypto phishing scams dropped by almost 50% in February, marking the third consecutive decline since December. According to data from ScamSniffer, the attacks dropped by around 48% month-over-month in February to $5.32 million, a noticeable decline from January’s $10.25 million and December’s $23.58 million.
In a thread on X, analysts from ScamSniffer revealed that 7,442 victims lost their crypto assets to phishing scams in February, a stark contrast to January’s 9,220 victims.
ScamSniffer also revealed that the average crypto loss in January was $1,112 per victim. In February, the figure dropped to about $714 per victim.
Details of Crypto Phishing Attacks
$771,000 in Ethereum was lost through address poisoning, a type of scam in which attackers generate wallet addresses that closely resemble a victim’s previous transaction addresses. They then send small, meaningless transactions to “poison” the victim’s transaction history, hoping the victim mistakenly copies and sends funds to the scam address in future transactions.
Another $610,000 was lost through unrevoked phishing approvals on the Binance Smart Chain. A permit scam cost a victim over $611,000 in ETH, while another $326,000 was lost through an “increase approval” scam. In this attack, users are tricked into raising token spending limits for malicious transactions.
ScamSniffer also pointed out an incident that occurred more than a year ago, in which a victim lost over $607,200 in ETH through a phishing approval attack. They stressed the need for users to revoke old approvals while Ethereum gas fees remain low.
While the volume of losses through phishing scams is declining, ScamSniffer urges crypto users and investors to keep their guard by verifying all signatures and revoking all unused approvals.
In general, February saw well over $1.5 billion in crypto losses. This marks an increase of over 18x in the last year, with the most significant being the $1.46 billion Bybit hack and the Stablecoin firm, Infini, which suffered a $49.5 million hack.
Seven smaller coordinated attacks were involved. The most notable were Ionic Money and zkLend, which lost $8.6 million and $9.5 million, respectively.
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