A new scam campaign is abusing Google Ads to steal cryptocurrency from victims, researchers have found. According to a new report, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency got stolen from users’ crypto wallets by scammers.
MIUI 13 Will Be Available By End Of The Year
Follow us on Twitter, Telegram and Instagram
While scammers traditionally use email to launch their phishing campaigns, in this case, they placed Google Ads at the top of Google Search. They imitated popular crypto wallets and platforms including Phantom App, MetaMask and Pancake Swap to lure their victims.
Multiple scamming groups are now bidding for wallet-related keywords on Google Ads and are using Google Search as an attack vector to target victims’ crypto wallets.
Each of the fake advertisements used in the campaign contains a malicious link that, when clicked, directs victims to a phishing site that copies the brand and messaging of the original crypto wallet website. From here, the scammers trick their victims into giving up their wallet passwords to steal their contents.
Cryptowallets Hacked
Once a victim navigates to the scammers’ fake websites, they attempt to steal their passphrase if they already have a crypto wallet with the service or they provide a new passphrase for those creating a wallet for the first time. Either way, though, the scammers gain access to a victim’s crypto wallet and can then steal all of their cryptocurrency.
We found 11 compromised wallet accounts with each of them containing between $1k to $10k in cryptocurrency. However, by cross-referencing Reddit forums where victims reported that the funds in their crypto wallets got stolen. They lost an estimate of $500k during this past weekend alone.
To avoid falling victim to this scam and others like it, we recommend that users carefully examine all the URLs they visit in their browser, avoid crypto ads as they could be fake and never give out their passphrase to anyone online.
How To Delete Your Facebook Account Permanently
Follow us on Twitter, Telegram and Instagram
2 comments
Comments are closed.