Malicious actors continue to scam crypto investors. This time through a fake ETHereum Denver website.
Ethereum Denver (ETHereum Denver), the world's largest and longest-running Ethereum and Web3 community innovation festival, is the latest crypto-related entity targeted by malicious actors.
On February 20th, Twitter user Blockfence was the first to notice the fraudulent website. It appears that malicious actors duplicated the ETHereum Denver website and attempted to trick users into connecting to the website using their MetaMask wallets.
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The Blockfence found that in the last six months, by using the fake ETHereum Denver website, hackers managed to access over 2,800 wallets and steal more than $300,000.
Based on the Blockfence CEO Omri Lahav the company’s research team noticed a fake website accidentally. The team behind Blockfence was looking into various trends in the crypto industry.
When talking about how hackers managed to steal funds, Lahav noted that malicious actors masterfully duplicated the website. Hackers asked investors to enter the site with their MetaMask wallet through a standard “connect wallet” button.
On the website, hackers encouraged investors to complete a transaction, which allowed them illegally obtain user funds. During its investigation, Blockfence found that the smart contract was used to steal over 177 Ethereum (ETH). Moreover, Lahav added:
Since the smart contract was deployed almost six months ago, it’s possible that it was used on other phishing websites.
What is interesting about this phishing scheme is that malicious actors went as far as to purchase Google advertisements for its fake website. At the time of writing, the ad for the fake ETHereum Denver website appeared second in the Google search, while the actual site of ETHDenver was the first result.
Reacting to the news, ETHDenver shared a tweet warning its almost 42,000 followers about the matter.
It is worth noting that, at the end of January, the news broke that hackers created a fake website of Ripple and sent letters to investors mimicking crypto exchange Binance in an attempt to scam people.
