Cryptocurrency scammers have finally met their thieving match: themselves.
A new scam has been circulating primarily on YouTube that would make even the most cunning trickster take off their hat, security firm Kaspersky said in a security update last week.
“I have USDT stored in my wallet and I have the seed phrase. How do I transfer my funds to another wallet?” Kaspersky noted one such comment. The specific wallet contained more than $8,000 in stablecoins on the Tron blockchain. The phrase is a string of words that grants its insiders access to a crypto wallet.
This question, however, was not from a crypto newbie but from a cleverly laid trap. Those stablecoins were held in a multi-signature wallet and, in theory, require a gas fee to be able to withdraw funds.
However, when the thieves attempted to siphon off the funds by sending Tron’s TRX tokens to the wallet, the sent tokens mysteriously evaporated into another wallet controlled by the scammers.
The problem is that the bait wallet is configured as a multi-signature wallet. Authorizing outgoing transactions on such wallets requires approval from two or more people, so transferring USDT to a personal wallet will not work and will instead be transferred somewhere else.
“Scammers pose as beginners who foolishly share access to their crypto wallets, fooling equally naive thieves, who end up becoming victims,” Kaspersky said. “In this scenario, the scammers are somewhat like digital Robin Hoods, as the scheme primarily targets other dishonest individuals.”
This scam is no lone wolf either, with several cases on the Internet filled with similar comments from new accounts, all of which had the same seed phrase, Kaspersky said.
As such, gas fees are typically cheap, costing less than $10 on most blockchains, meaning the target is likely to be aimed at would-be thieves rather than a complex operation looking to steal. thousands, or even millions, of dollars.
But expect a crypto criminal to make money whenever they have the opportunity to do so.
