If you’re one of those who habitually copy crypto wallet addresses from the transaction history page when sending halal crypto — beware! Scammers are taking advantage of user carelessness and tricking them into sending cryptocurrencies to a fraudulent wallet address. This recent scam that has been gaining traction is known as the crypto wallet address poisoning scam. Read on to find out how exactly this scam works and how to protect yourself from falling victim to it.
The Power of Crypto Addresses Becomes A Weakness
A crypto wallet address is typically long. It contains hexadecimal numbers (mostly numerical and a few alphabetical characters), which makes the address unintelligible and very difficult to remember. This is an important factor to prevent manipulation.
Rather than memorizing the long address, we have come to rely on copying and pasting addresses for ease of transaction. Furthermore, crypto addresses are usually shortened even on transaction pages to only show the first and last few characters. So the most that people may do is to memorize those few characters (prefix/suffix).
And now, scammers are taking advantage of this habit to scam careless victims.
How The Address Poisoning Scam Works
The way the crypto wallet address poisoning scam works is relatively simple.
- You send a regular transaction to an account.
- The scammer notices this transaction through a software that monitors transfers of certain tokens.
- They then generate a vanity address that matches the first and last characters of the wallet address.
- The scammer sends you a negligible value e.g. $0 token transaction from their fraud address to your account.
- The fraud address appears in your transaction history and you may accidentally copy that address the next time you intend to send funds to the original address.
Note that the scammer won’t have access to your wallet address. They can only wait and hope that you copy the wrong address from your transaction history.
What Is A Vanity Address?
A vanity address is a crypto address which part of it — usually the prefix/suffix — can be chosen by the user. Once the address is generated, the private key can be revealed and the user can download a password-encrypted keystore file and access funds. This is how scammers generate the fraud address based on their victim’s wallet address.
Ways to Protect from Poisoning Scams
While you can’t stop anyone, including scammers, from sending crypto to your account, you can certainly take steps to prevent from sending crypto to a wrong account.
Most importantly, stop the habit of carelessly copying wallet addresses from the transaction history. If you still need to, however, remember to double check every single character of the address before sending any funds.
If you are a Sahal Wallet user, you can save time and avoid the hassle of checking the characters by saving trusted crypto wallet address to your address book. When sending funds, you can type the saved recipient name and it will auto-populate the address field.
By only sending halal crypto assets to saved contacts, you can avoid falling victim to the poisoning scam.
Easy Sahal Wallet Ensures Secure Transactions
Sahal Wallet is a multichain, self-custodial halal crypto wallet with a simple interface for anyone to participate in decentralized finance (DeFi). It is built to cater to the 1.7 billion plus faith-based communities seeking alternatives to the predominantly interest-based DeFi products. As such, the Sahal Wallet only lists halal crypto projects.
Download the Sahal Wallet app for secure halal crypto transactions with low gas fees.