Solana (SOL)-based wallet provider Phantom has announced a new feature that will burn spam non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sent by scammers.
In an August 18 blog post, the Phantom team said that spam NFTs have evolved to be a practical way for bad actors looking to steal users’ funds.
“We’re still in the Wild West days of Web3. As the crypto ecosystem grows, so have the number of bad actors looking for ways to steal user’s funds,” the wallet said. “The rapid growth in popularity of NFTs has led to an increasingly prevalent method of attack for scammers – Spam NFTs.”
The wallet provider said scammers are taking advantage of Solana’s low transaction fees and airdrop spam NFTs to users. These unwanted NFTs ask users to click a link in order to receive a free gift.
After clicking the link, users are taken to a site where they are “asked to approve a transaction to “mint” or “claim” a free NFT,” which will lead to the loss of funds.
“These scams are becoming increasingly more sophisticated,” the wallet said, noting that scammers can “change the metadata of an NFT to try to avoid being blocklisted.”
In a bid to tackle this issue, Phantom has announced the Burn NFT feature. Users can remove the unwanted NFTs by selecting the Burn Token function. Users will also receive a small deposit of SOL each time they use this feature.
3/ Spam NFTs clutter wallets, but they are not dangerous to burn. Just be careful to avoid their links, as they can expose you to scams/phishing attempts that can result in being exploited.
Providing an easy way to clean up their wallets will help keep our community protected.
— Phantom (@phantom) August 17, 2022
Aside from the burn feature, the wallet also uses other methods to fight spam NFTs. Phantom said they blacklist the contract address and domain of a scam NFT as soon as they find out about it.
“Our blocklist has already 800+ mint addresses of malicious NFT collections and is integrated with how we identify scams in our siteblocking,” the wallet said.
Phantom also fights NFT scams through its “phishing warning system,” which issues warning to users on “any malicious transactions that could compromise their assets or permissions.”
5/ We are also collaborating with @blowfishxyz to introduce a more advanced phishing warning system today.
When spam NFTs trick users into using a misleading site, we issue a warning on any malicious transactions that could compromise their assets or permissions.
— Phantom (@phantom) August 17, 2022
Along with a substantial increase in the amount of DeFi hacks in this summer, there has also been an uptick in the number of spam NFTs targeting the NFT community members.
As reported, the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) lost ETH 200 worth of digital assets in an exploit in early June. NFT influencer Zeneca and NFT registration platform PREMINT also fell victim to hacks in mid-July.
That’s not all. As reported, the Solana team tied the widespread hack that had affected over 8,000 wallets and resulted in the loss of over USD 8m worth of funds to the closed-source Slope wallet. The Phantom team also said at the time that “Phantom has reason to believe that the reported exploits [of Phantom wallets] are due to complications related to importing accounts to and from Slope.”
Source: Cryptonews
