- Binance CEO draws light to a crypto scam that almost ran off with $20 million.
- The scammer’s clever tactic was caught by the team before it could cause serious damage.
- CZ reminds the crypto community to stay vigilant and always check their wallet addresses.
Binance caught fraudulent activity and put a stop to a highly sophisticated scam attempt yesterday. The quick-action from the Binance team has saved a large sum of funds from slipping into the scammer’s hands.
In detail, CEO of Binance, Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao alerts the crypto community by sharing the news on Twitter. Specifically, he draws light to how scammers are getting smarter and are finding new ways to operate crypto scams.
According to the tweet above, CZ says Binance’s quick moves saved the platform $20 million in funds. In response, many replies highlight the need for vigilance in identifying the ever-evolving tactics of scammers in the crypto space.
In particular, for this case, CZ draws light to the scammer’s ingenuity of generating addresses that appear identical to legitimate ones. He says they are doing so by matching starting and ending letters of users’ public wallets.
This tactic capitalizes on the fact that most wallet holders don’t check their full public address, but rather only the first and last few characters. Some scammers are hiding most of the characters in the middle of the public addresses with … to hide the actual scammer address behind it.
To further deceive their targets, the scammer executed dust transactions to the generated address. As a result, the address showed up in the victim’s wallet alongside other previous transactions. Here’s where the real danger lies – when the crypto operator attempts to send funds to the intended legitimate address, they mistakenly pick one of the previous transactions and copy the address, leading to a tragic outcome.
Luckily, Binance, a highly experienced crypto exchange, noticed the error immediately after the transaction. The team took swift action with a request to freeze the USDT funds in question. While the recovery process is still underway and involves filing a police report, the crucial aspect was that the funds were successfully withheld from the scammers.
The incident serves as a stark reminder to the entire crypto community about the need for vigilance and fast reactions in the face of such scams. Being proactive and staying informed about the latest scams can significantly mitigate the risk of falling victim to such fraudulent activities. Thus, CZ ends his message with telling the community to stay safe.