Hayden Adams, the creator of decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap, has issued a warning to the cryptocurrency community regarding a scam involving wallet addresses being used as Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains.
On February 14th, Adams took to X to share his concerns about scammers impersonating his Ethereum wallet. He explained that these scammers had copied and registered his wallet address as an ENS wallet with a .eth domain. Additionally, Adams noted that when users pasted his wallet address into certain user interfaces, an ENS match unrelated to his address would appear as the top search result.
The purpose of this scam appears to be to confuse individuals sending digital assets, causing them to accidentally send their crypto to the wrong address instead of the intended recipient. Adams urged user interfaces to implement filters to prevent any losses resulting from this attack vector.
Although this scam vector may seem new, Taylor Monahan, the founder of Ethereum wallet manager MyCrypto, stated in a post that the same scam vector was used during the early days of the MyEtherWallet wallet service. Monahan added that it caused issues with registrations and resolutions for names starting with “0x” at that time.
Nick Johnson, the founder and lead developer of ENS, also commented on this scam vector, advising against autocompleting names in interfaces. Johnson deemed it “far too dangerous” and mentioned that ENS discourages this practice in its user experience guidelines.
In January, crypto investors reported receiving emails from scammers pretending to be major Web3 companies. These scammers conducted a widespread email campaign promoting fake airdrops while impersonating firms like Cointelegraph, WalletConnect, Token Terminal, and other crypto companies.
It was later discovered that this phishing attack was a result of a security breach at the email marketing firm MailerLite. On January 24th, the firm confirmed that hackers had gained control of Web3 accounts through a social engineering attack. Nansen’s research team estimated that the scammer’s phishing wallet had received approximately $3.3 million since the start of the campaign.
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