Address poisoning attacks hit Safe Wallet users, losses exceed $5m

Dozens of Safe Wallet users have lost millions worth of crypto due to a recent wave of address poisoning attacks.

In an X post on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023 analysts at Scam Sniffer said that an unknown scammer stole more than $2 million worth of crypto from 10 Safe Wallet-based entities in just one week using the so-called “address poisoning” attack, a scam where bad actors are spamming the transaction history page with similar operations a bid to trick victims into sending funds to the scammer’s address.

As per Scam Sniffer, the same attacker has succeeded in their efforts, stealing a total of $5 million worth of crypto from 21 victims in the past four months. As of press time, the Safe Wallet team made no public statements on the matter.

Address poisoning has become quite a popular attack among con artists in early 2023, when MetaMask warned users about the new scam method. According to MetaMask’s analysts, scammers are using on-chain tracers that monitor transfers of certain tokens to detect wealthy investors. Once they find a victim, they are using a “vanity” address generator, a JavaScript-based script used to generate an address that closely matches the victim’s address.

In late November 2023, analysts at a blockchain forensic firm PeckShield revealed in an X post that Florence Finance fell victim to an address poisoning scam, resulting in a loss of $1.45 million in USDC. It is unclear if that incident is related to the recent scam activity aimed at Safe Wallet users.