Watch Out For This New Crypto Scam: ENS Wallet Impersonation

Hayden Adams, the founder of decentralized exchange Uniswap, has exposed a new scam that capitalizes on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to deceive unsuspecting individuals. The scam involves impersonating legitimate ENS wallet addresses, eventually putting users’ cryptos at risk.

Adams took to X (formerly Twitter) to alert about scammers who had ingeniously duplicated and registered his Ethereum wallet address as an ENS domain ending with .eth.

How Bad Actors Conduct Crypto Scam With ENS Wallet Impersonation

The fraudulent act creates a misleading ENS match that appears as the top search result in certain user interfaces when a user enters Adams’ wallet address. The deceptive similarity could indeed lead users to transfer funds to the scammer’s address, mistaking it for the intended recipient’s.

The scam highlights a concern in the crypto community about how transaction ease and anonymity can benefit wrongdoers. Adams urges the need for user interfaces to have safeguards. These should filter out deceptive addresses to reduce the risk of losses.

Echoing Adams’ concerns, ENS lead developer and founder Nick Johnson weighed in on the issue, advocating for a cautious approach towards autocompleting names in user interfaces.

“IMO, interfaces shouldn’t autocomplete names at all; it’s far too dangerous. I think we advise against it in our UX guidelines,” Johnson said.

Read more: Crypto Social Media Scams: How to Stay Safe

Crypto Scammers Impersonate Hayden Adams Address. Source: X (Twitter)

The sentiment is shared by DeFi enthusiast Alex, who questions the lack of preventative measures from ENS against such frauds.

“It is difficult to estimate the loss of users through this kind of fraud. What to do next? Limit the number of characters in [myEthereumAddress].eth, put a warning on all such addresses that have already been created and forbid the creation of such addresses via ENS,” Alex said.

This incident is part of a larger trend of scams plaguing the crypto industry. These include advanced email phishing campaigns posing as well-known crypto brands and honeypot schemes on social media. Indeed, the crypto space is full of vulnerabilities that scammers take advantage of.

Read more: Ethereum Name Service (ENS): Everything You Need To Know

In January alone, nearly $600,000 was swindled from victims through such phishing operations. In 2023, losses from various scams and exploits exceeded $1.8 billion, encompassing code exploits, private key compromises, exit scams, and phishing attacks.