Address associated with crypto draining tool Pink Drainer falls for address poisoning scam

A user address associated with the crypto wallet-draining scam-as-a-service Pink Drainer has seemingly fallen victim to an address-poisoning scam — albeit a small one.

According to crypto analyst firm MistTrack, the address lost 10 ether — worth just over $29,000 at current prices — to a fake wallet address late last month.

An address-poisoning attack occurs when an attacker sends small amounts of coins or tokens to a user's wallet from an address that looks similar to one of the user's regularly used wallets — usually by making the first and last few characters look the same — in the hopes of tricking the user into unknowingly sending funds to the attacker's wallet when copying and pasting the recipient address.

In this case, the real address was 0xEfF0E5244d5C78Ba4DD6bc01082576280558f58A and the fake address was 0xEfF0eCD2eB275C3CEE4A17D9B8f101551d58f58A.

The lost funds are a drop in the bucket compared to Pink Drainer's lifetime earnings from crypto scams. The group has stolen more than $85 million since July 2023, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Earlier this year, in May, Pink Drainer announced on Telegram that it would be retiring after hitting said milestone. “We have reached our goal and now, according to plan, it’s time to for us to retire,” developers said. “After this message’s publication, we will begin winding down all of our infrastructure. All stored information will be wiped and securely destroyed.”

Pink Drainer offers a software kit that cybercriminals use to steal crypto assets by exploiting technical vulnerabilities that rely heavily on social engineering tactics and distributing phishing links. Such schemes use malicious phishing sites to trick users into signing transactions that drain cryptocurrencies and NFTs from their wallets.