Pink Drainer, a well-known group known for draining wallets, recently fell victim to an “address poisoning” scam, resulting in them experiencing a taste of their own medicine. MistTrack, a crypto compliance platform, highlighted the attack in a post on July 7, revealing that the hacking group lost 10 Ether (ETH) to the scam, which is equivalent to approximately $30,000 at current market prices. The scam involved the use of a fake wallet address that closely resembled Pink Drainer’s regular wallet address, causing them to mistakenly send funds to the incorrect wallet.
According to MistTrack, an address poisoning scam occurs when an attacker sends small amounts of cryptocurrency from a wallet with a similar-looking address to the target’s genuine wallet. The goal is to deceive the target into accidentally sending funds to the fake address. MistTrack explained that scammers utilize bots to search for new transactions and create fake addresses that have a few similar characters to the actual address being used. By doing so, scammers rely on the victim copying the fake address instead of their original address.
In this particular case, the attackers sent funds from a wallet address that had an almost identical identifier to Pink Drainer’s previous wallet, successfully tricking Pink Drainer into sending a total of 10 ETH to the fake address by mistake.
This incident occurred just a month after Pink Drainer unexpectedly announced on May 17 that it would be retiring its services after achieving its goal of stealing over $85 million in cryptocurrency assets. According to data from Dune Analytics, Pink Drainer managed to steal $85.3 million in crypto starting from July 2023.
Although Pink Drainer has ceased its operations, there are still other drainer toolkit services available, such as Angel Drainer, Pussy Drainer, and Venom Drainer, which assist malicious actors in stealing crypto assets.
In an unrelated development, Polkadot’s Indy 500 driver Conor Daly expressed surprise at the fact that his father holds DOT, the cryptocurrency associated with Polkadot.