Crypto domain spoofing and how to avoid these scams
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Loading... - Emilia Salo
- 15 Sep 2022
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Crypto scams have dipped this year.
Crypto scams have dipped this year. At the end of July, bad actors made away with $1.6 billion of ill-gotten funds — that's 65 percent lower than the figure for the same duration in 2021. However, this doesn't mean that we can let our guard down.
Scammers are always looking for new ways to rob you of your crypto holdings. And one of the latest methods attackers are employing these days is domain spoofing. It is the act of impersonating the website of well-known crypto exchanges, DeFi platforms, DApps, etc.
Unknowing victims interact and transact with these bogus websites and lose a lot of money. So tag along as we take a closer look at domain spoofing and learn some best practices to transact safely in the cryptoverse.
The near-perfect domain
Domain spoofing has been around for a while. Earlier, scammers would use this method to imitate the domains of banks and other traditional financial institutions. Now, bad actors are using this exploit in the world of crypto.
The imitations have also gotten harder to spot. Scammers are now using Unicode symbols to replace standard English characters. These symbols look like letters, making it easy to get past the defence of unsuspecting victims.
For instance, they may use an upside-down exclamation mark (¡) as an 'i' in a link. Or they may insert the symbol for the Greek letter alpha ('α') as an 'a'. They may also use simpler methods such as an extra letter or zero instead of 'o’. To the untrained eye, these look like legit domains. Moreover, scammers use well-designed knockoffs of genuine websites, making it even harder to tell the difference. Read More...
