Coinbase is the crypto brand in the “banking and finance” section most used by phishing scammers. It has been calculated that, in the last 4 years, hackers have chosen it to impersonate in as many as 416 attacks.
Coinbase is the crypto brand most chosen by phishing scammers
According to the report by Mailstuite, Coinbase is the most chosen crypto brand by phishing scammers in the USA, who have impersonated the crypto-exchange in as many as 416 attacks in the last 4 years.
Nothing to do with the data on Meta, targeted by fraudsters 25 times more than Coinbase, collecting a total of 10,457 attacks.
Not only that, Coinbase has been placed by Mailsuite in the category of “banking and financial brands”, whose first place was “won” by JCB with 14,907 scams in its name.
In this category, other brands used as fraudulent sites also stand out, such as PayPal for 4,111 phishing scams, Mastercard with 1,262, and Visa with 1,190. The brand of Bank of America, on the other hand, is just above Coinbase, used in 632 phishing attacks.
Phishing attacks are online social schemes that aim to deceive investors, to induce them to voluntarily send digital assets to the imitator’s cryptocurrency wallet.
Coinbase: the coalition with Meta, Kraken, Ripple and others against online scams
At the end of May, Coinbase had announced the creation of a new coalition, the “Tech Against Scams”.
This is a group that includes companies such as Meta, Kraken, Ripple, Gemini, the Global Anti-Scam Organization, and March Group.
The objective of the coalition is to unite forces to combat online fraud and fraudulent financial schemes, pooling their knowledge and expertise in various sectors, and thus, managing to protect users.
Specifically, in addition to sharing their own information, the participants of the coalition commit together to educate users, develop defense technology, and collaborate with the authorities.
The technique of Approval Phishing
Already between 2023 and 2024, Chainalysis had published a report on crypto frauds, paying particular attention to the explosive growth of Approval Phishing. In 2023 alone, in fact, 374.5 million dollars were stolen through this technique.
In practice, Approval Phishing, the scammers induce users to sign a malicious blockchain transaction. Specifically, the victim user’s signature gives the scammer’s address the approval to spend specific tokens within their wallet, allowing them to empty the victim’s wallet of all those tokens.
This technique is associated with romantic scams, as the scammers need to convince the victims to sign approval transactions.
Chainalysis states that the explosive increase in Approval Phishing in the crypto sector is based on the increase of decentralized applications (dApp) that request approval signatures to authorize smart contracts.
By creating this new habit for users, phishers manage to insert themselves and forward their signature request for fraudulent approval.
