Over $1M worth of ETH, NFTs stolen in phishing attack

A phishing scammer, who goes by the pseudonym “Monkey Drainer,” stole 700 Ethereum (ETH) tokens, worth around $1.05 million, over the past 24 hours, on-chain sleuth ‘ZachXBT’ pointed out in a Twitter thread.

1/ Over the past 24 hrs ~700 ETH ($1m) has been stolen by the phishing scammer known as Monkey Drainer.

They recently surpassed 7300 transactions from their drainer wallet after being around for only a few months. pic.twitter.com/6vAYBiqCxQ

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) October 25, 2022

In phishing scams, miscreants create fake malicious websites that masquerade as legitimate crypto businesses to gain access to wallet keys and login credentials.

Monkey Drainer’s scam wallet has been around for a few months and has completed over 7,300 transactions, the sleuth noted.

Nearly 35% of the past day’s loot was stolen from two victims, who collectively lost assets worth approximately $370,000, according to ZachXBT. The largest victim held over $6.2 million worth of cryptocurrencies but only lost $220,000 worth of assets, while the other transaction requests were rejected.

The scammer stole several non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from the second largest victim, including one Bored Ape Yacht Club, one Clone X, as well as $36000 worth of USD Coin (USDC), collectively valued at around $150,000.

Monkey Drainer has managed to scam several people over the past few weeks, with the miscreant’s total haul hovering around $3.5 million, as per ZachXBT’s estimates.

Earlier this week, crypto exchange FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said that the exchange will compensate phishing victims who lost a total of $6 million worth of assets. However, he warned that it was a one-time exception and pointed out that phishing needs to be fought collectively as an industry.

Phishing remains one of the most popular ways of exploitation in the crypto sector. Phishing attacks increased by 170% in Q2 2022, compared to the first quarter, according to the second quarter Web3 Security report by blockchain security firm Certik.