A new scam is making the rounds, stealing funds with the promise of free tokens. Recently discovered, this scam dangles a complete private key to a wallet with tokens valued at a significant sum.
Unfortunately, the wallet has no ETH to move the tokens. But the private key is already tainted – someone else knows about it and watches the wallet. Every time someone attempts to move the tokens, the ETH will be stolen. With high ETH fees to move tokens, the loss may be sizable.
The best approach to the new scam is not to open the wallet and attempt to extract the funds.
The tokens themselves are very illiquid, and their price information is given based on a single decentralized pair. But there is no actual liquidity in that pair, so the sum in the wallet cannot be sold anyway.
NFT Honeypots Drain Solana Wallets
The ETH scam is not the only possibility for NFT enthusiasts. Another tool to steal funds relies on the need to pay SOL for token mints or play to earn items.
Faked platform accounts connect to Solana wallets, then give commands to perform multiple transactions.
The best approach is to always use the official links and channels for play to earn games. To mint new items or test new games, a new wallet with limited funds can also limit losses in cases of malicious minting honeypots.
CryptoMafia Hit with Copycat Contract
Among the recent honeypots, the Crypto Mafia game was affected by an NFT honeypot. Apparently, the scam was caused by a copied contract.
CryptoMafia is a newly emerging play to earn community, with around 1,500 players. The game team is currently working to increase safety with smart contract audits. Choosing newly emerging games with brand-new mints may be the key to larger earnings, but there is also an increased risk of copycat products.
To add to the confusion, there are different CryptoMafia games, built on Solana and Binance Smart Chain. The game built on Binance Smart Chain is only days old and is yet to show its security mechanism.
