Major Crypto Wallet Issues Crucial Warning to Community: Details
Ledger wallet’s team has taken to the X social media platform to announce they have come across a brand new type of cryptocurrency scam that cyber criminals use to hit users' wallets to take hold of their holdings.
Ledger published a thread on X to explain how this scam works and how not to fall for it.
"Address-poisoning scam"
The new type of cryptocurrency scam, which Ledger is sounding the alarm about, is called “address poisoning.” It happens when a user suddenly sees a mysterious coin or NFT in their wallet – an asset that they had not put in there.
When this happens, the Ledger team warns, it is most likely that you have become a target for this new type of scam attack. When a scammer sends you some coins, this transaction gets added to your Ledger Live transaction history, and it will look like you already sent money to that wallet in the past.
If you've ever seen a mysterious coin or NFT appear in your wallet - one that you didn't send or ask anyone to send to you - then you may have been the target of an address-poisoning scam.
Want to know how address poisoning scams work and how you can avoid them? Scroll down to… pic.twitter.com/PDa2Fgov1x— Ledger (@Ledger) June 21, 2024
The fraudsters hope that the wallet’s owner will mistakenly copy that address from the history of transactions and use it to send funds instead of a real address. However, they cannot steal any crypto from your wallet if you are being attentive and do not initiate a transaction yourself by signing it with your Ledger.
Guidance on how to avoid trouble
The main advice on how not to fall for an address poisoning scam is simple, according to the Ledger support team; it is to ignore the malicious transaction and the wallet attached to it.
It is also important to avoid those suspicious tokens or NFTs that have been sent to you by scammers. A good idea here is to select the token/NFT and then select the "Hide Token/NFT Collection" option, the Ledger team guides. This will help you avoid accidentally interacting with this scam wallet and prevent you from sending a transaction to it.