Wallet drainers are basically decentralised applications (DAPPS) that on interaction are able to gain access to your funds and can make transactions automatically from your wallets.

There are various types of wallet drainers but the most popular ones have some distinctive features……

Two of these features that mostly standout are 👍

The ability to control your funds because you approved an inconspicuous signature on dAPP interaction.
The ability to keep bugging you to approve a transaction without the wallet popup screen actually ever closing. It just keeps popping up and up until you are subconsciously forced to approve the transaction.

These two features are what makes wallet drainers so fearsome, most especially the first one because it is so secretive that you do/might not know you have interacted with a suspicious link. For a wallet drainer using the first feature, it doesn’t really do much except prompt you for the first dAPP interaction to approve connecting your wallet but you wouldn’t know you are also approving an invisible transaction signature.

This wallet drainer then goes on to do nothing for a while before executing a fast swipe transaction suddenly that leaves your wallet as empty as a cuckoo bird’s nest..

Major Examples of the above include the Inferno Drainer and the Angel Drainer with the Angel Drainer being associated with the recent attack on Ledger.

The image above depicts the stats of the Angle Drainer as collated by dune.com’s Scam Sniffer and we can see that a notable number of individuals have had their wallets drained.

The Angel Drainer has been associated with an active group in Russian states and around the world whose developers actively encourage a free public use of the Angel Drainer tool (well its not actually free as they charge a $40000 downpayment and would collect a 20% fee of whatever earnings a user makes draining wallets).

Particularly notable exploits orchestrated by Angel Drainer include the Balancer and Galxe DNS hijacking attacks.

In the Balancer incident, the website's interface was compromised by injecting malicious JavaScript code into the front-end interface of app.balancer.fi. This led users to unwittingly approve malicious transactions, resulting in over $350,000 being transferred to attackers through phishing attacks.

In the Galxe case, malicious actors impersonated Dynadot, the domain service provider, gaining unauthorized access to the domain account's DNS. Subsequently, nearly 1,120 users interacting with the fraudulent site lost nearly $270,000.

Ledger, a renowned manufacturer of hardware and cold crypto wallets, became the latest target of Angel Drainer. The phishing team exploited the Ledger Connect Kit, impacting the front-end interfaces of connected applications including Balancer, which has already suffered from Angel Drainer, as well as SushiSwap, Revoke.cash, and Zapper, stealing from users at least $600,000.

There’s also a third Wallet drainer Model where NFT’s get sent into your wallet with a possible Origin or Redeem link. Given that you do not know how this nft came to be, curiosity tends to make you say, let’s check it out, let’s see what the nft is worth and that’s where your problems would start because on clicking on the link, you are most times automatically approving transaction signatures that can be used to process outbound transactions from your wallet.

HOW TO STAY SAFE FROM WALLET DRAINERS.

There are a variety of ways you can stay safe from wallet drainers, namely:

Do not visit suspicious links.. It might not look suspicious to you but do ask yourself, is the source legit??
Always verify the trusted addresses of any dAPP you want to interact with…. Make sure you are always in the right place.
Use BURNER WALLETS for all initial dAPP interactions. Burner wallets are wallets with just a negligible amount of crypto assets which are barely enough for one or two transactions and are expendable. This becomes your method of verifying a dAPP’s authenticity.
You can avoid Airdrops all together ( you sef na baller on a regular)
Have multiple wallets for different purposes, ones for airdrops (should be practically empty) and then your main wallets.
Do make sure to almost always leave your assets in a staking account, such that they can’t easily be moved without enough authorization on suspicious dAPP interactions..

If you have any unique views on this Wallet drainer and Crypto scams SAGA, do not hesitate to put it in the comment section below and you can always hit me up on twitter @I_amProf or send me a mail so we can discuss the best way to safeguard your funds.

Do have a nice stay and stay SAFU…