2023-06-19 10:33:26
“These are just children” – we may naively think, and then the truth may hit us in the face that these children are stealing millions of dollars by stealing NFT. The more reserved students use the money they earn to pay their schoolmates to solve their lessons, while the more extreme ones buy cars, mobile phones, and designer items, but there are also those who invest their money in poker and video games. In order to understand the teenagers’ method, we need to be aware of what “NFT Draining” means. Well, probably everyone has heard of NFTs. These are non-substitutable tokens, the most popular of which play the same role as an original 18th century painting or the most valuable Yu-gi-oh card. If you own an NFT, you also own its ownership, which is proof written in a line of code that the given piece is only yours. They usually appear in collections, and the most popular ones can be worth several million dollars. We can also say that with the advent of today’s digital world, instead of traditional stamp collecting, it is now a bigger party to collect NFTs. And with the appearance of a new device, of course, some method for stealing that device goes hand in hand. This is where the aforementioned “NFT Draining” comes into play, of which there are several forms. One example is a transaction disguised as an NFT purchase, during which the victim assumes that by completing the transaction and paying the gas fees, he will receive valuable NFT, but the exact opposite happens, and following signing, the buyer’s NFT is transferred to the fraudster to his wallet. With the signature, a contract is created that gives access to the other participant of the transaction to the victim’s wallet and thus enables him to transfer the assets – tokens – in the wallet. Posed as a journalist, reaped 1 million in seconds Take the case of Orbiter Finance. Last month, an alleged journalist posing as a crypto news site contacted one of the news site’s Discord moderators and asked them to fill out a form. The moderator didn’t know that this simple act was giving away control of their Discord server. Once inside, the perpetrator froze other admins’ control over the server and restricted the ability of community members to send messages. He then posted an announcement that a (fake) airdrop was coming and lured everyone to a phishing website whose sole purpose was to steal NFTs. And it worked. He stole a total of one million dollars worth of NFTs and tokens in the blink of an eye as the real team members watched helplessly. NFT scams have already netted criminals $73 million The Orbiter attack is just another example in a long line of scams involving NFT draining and compromised Discord servers or Twitter accounts. Data collected by the NFT analyst and security expert known as OKHotshot shows that at least 900 Discord servers have been compromised to carry out phishing attacks since December 2021 – with a notable upward trend in the past three months. According to data collected by PeckShield and analysis by Dune Analytics, such attacks affected the wallets of at least 32,000 victims in the past nine months. The attackers stole a total of $73 million worth of NFTs and tokens. Teenage students are behind most of the attacks Phishing attacks first turn to Telegram and Discord, where they find channels run by the developers of many different types of drainers. They contact the developer and purchase the drainers, which come in the form of a set of code that can be integrated into a website, while usually agreeing to give the developer 20-30% of the revenue. Then, using their own methods – one example being the fake news site above – they compromise a Discord server or Twitter account and advertise a fake website with NFT drainer code to steal NFTs and anything else they can lay their hands on… they do this when they are not doing their homework. “95% of the perpetrators are high school students under the age of 18,” said a security researcher known as Plum, who works in the trust and security team of the NFT marketplace OpenSea, adding that this is why the number of attacks usually increases during the summer holidays. . “I have personally spoken with quite a few of them and I know they are still in school,” he said. “I saw pictures and videos of most of them from their school. They talk regarding their teachers, regarding failing classes, or regarding having to do homework.” “[A megszerzett pénzből] they buy a laptop, some phones, shoes and spend huge amounts of money on Roblox. Most of them all play Roblox. They buy gear, skins, new video games and things like that.” Plum said. He added that they also often buy crypto gift cards on gift card marketplace Bitrefill, spend thousands of dollars on Uber Eats, buy designer clothes and pay others to do their homework for them. Sometimes they even buy a car that they can’t even drive, and the bravest ones even experiment with gambling. “They’ll bet up to $40,000 each in an online poker game and broadcast it to all the other kids over a Discord call.” But how do they get away with it? Students sneakily try to cover their tracks by paying people in lower-income countries to register on exchanges with their personal information, so they can’t be traced when they transfer the money they’ve earned. As to why petty criminals think they can get away with such attacks, Plum replied that “they feel invincible, they think no one can touch them.”
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