Phantom wallet, leader of the Solana blockchain, has implemented a feature to burn tokens. A better way to fight the resurgence of NFT spam sent by scammers to steal your funds.
Bigger and more sophisticated scams
An unknown NFT appearing out of nowhere in your wallet? It can be tempting to quickly take advantage of it. You may have experienced this recently on the Solana blockchain. But beware, it is above all else technique to steal you from funds.
This is a phenomenon that has been growing in recent weeks and that Phantom, the leader of the Solana wallet, does not intend to miss. To combat this phenomenon, the application takes matters into its own hands. Phantom now offers you a feature for these signs in exchange for an unlimited number of SOL and especially the cancellation of these possible scams. The wallet team mentions in a blog post:
We are still in the Wild West era of Web3. As the crypto ecosystem grows, so does the number of bad actors trying to steal user funds. The rapid growth in demand for NFTs has led to an increasingly popular method of attack for scammers – spam NFTs.
5/ As we introduce NFT burning alerts and improved phishing today, we’re not stopping there. Users can look forward to more automatic spam detection in the future.
To read more about how we’re fighting wallet spam, check out our latest blog post: https://t.co/OZYOEvVIFH
— Phantom (@phantom) August 17, 2022
According to the Phantom teams, this technique seems especially prevalent on the Solana blockchain because of low blockchain costs, compared to competing Ethereum for example. The technique is simple, the scammers ask you to Free NFT containing malicious link to steal your funds better.
In general, there are users encourage to click to mint this alleged free NFT. When this action is taken, the funds are stolen from the wallet. Sometimes some scammers are less subtle and ask directly for the seed phrase for the user with the same end result.
The Phantom team states in their blog post:
These scams are getting bigger and more sophisticated. For example, after a contract address and domain are identified as malicious, scammers can modify NFT metadata to try to avoid being blacklisted. It may seem like an endless game of cat and mouse.
This is not Phantom’s first act for cleaning up the encrypted space on Solana. Teams are already implementing solutions to combat scammers with a phishing alert system. The latter warns users in case of doubt about the validity of a link. Constant work in this war against scammers who always seem to be one step ahead.
Attacks against the Solana wallet are increasing
This summer is one of all the dangers for Solana who has already experienced a big hack at the beginning of August. These are no less than 8 million dollars were stolen by hackers. Fortunately, the action of the white hats was able to slow down their activity and limit the damage.
Phantom counts no less 2 million monthly active users and established himself as the initial solution to Solana. Easy to use, efficient and equipped with an intuitive interface, the wallet has everything to attract. In addition, this wallet took advantage of thean explosion of activity on the Solana blockchain during 2021. The latter has indeed established itself as the second largest NFT blockchain behind Ethereum.
In July, sales volume reached NFT $56.1 million still far from the $535.6 million on Ethereum according to data from CryptoSlam. Plummeting volume due to the bear market hitting the crypto market and the NFT sector.
Phantom’s actions are commendable and is necessary to sustain the adoption of a crypto wallet. As the project teams explained, Web 3 unfortunately looks too much like the Wild West. As long as scammers and other scammers manage take advantage of these flawsit will be difficult for the crypto industry to develop more ambitiously.
After DeFi, NFTs seem to be thesix new playgrounds for various hackers and scammers. The future will tell us who wins this a battle between industry players and scammers more ingenious methods!
To learn about the recent Solana blockchain hack, find our article here.
