Airdrop crypto scams: yetiswap.io, milkyswap.io, mmdex.io, artificial reality token and other
You’ve found a new token on your wallet. You’ve never bought it. And you’ve never heard about it. Is it luck or disaster?
Airdrop
Airdrop is a free token transfer. A gift, a giveaway. Why would someone make it?
- Legit projects do airdrops to increase awareness, attract new users, grow communities.
- Scams do airdrops to gain access to you wallet, steal your tokens, direct you to a malicious website, hack you or to perform any other kind of fraudulent behavior.
Legit or Scam
Legit projects
- have a working and meaningful website
- have active social accounts
- announce and market airdrops through website and social accounts
- verify contract code on blockchain explorer (e.g. bscscan) to prove that it does not contain malicious methods
- airdrop moderate number tokens to a limited number of users
Legit airdrop examples: https://coinmarketcap.com/airdrop/
Scam projects
- have no website or have website with no meaningful information about the token/project
- have no active social accounts
- have no airdrop announcements
- have unverified contract code
- airdrop lots of tokens to thousands of users
Airdrop scam intentions
Airdrop scam is an example of phishing.
Typically it works like this:
- send tokens to some unsuspecting investor
- when investor tries to sell tokens — ask for wallet permissions
- when investor approves them — gain full access to investor’s wallet
- steal all tokens from the wallet
In more rare cases it may try to perform dusting attack or to direct you to a malicious website (with virus, malware and so on).
Airdrop scam protection
The main idea behind it is that many people will try to interact (buy/sell, swap, visit website) with this tokens. If you don’t do this then you are safe.
There is no way to exclude you wallet from scam airdrop lists. Scammers automatically select active wallet addresses and airdrop their tokens to millions of wallets.
If you are unsure about some token — use desk.lsr.finance. We continuously analyze tokens and mark scams:
Also you can always ask us directly about any token in our telegram: laseryestoken
Airdrop scam examples
(1) yetiswap.io and milkyswap.io
Yetiswap is a known project from Avalanche C-Chain. But it never mentions any Binance Smart Chain contract address. It never references it in docs or on official website. And there is even an official twitter statement from its team that BSC token is a scam: https://twitter.com/YetiSwap/status/1485907790971420682
This means that 0x3b4deb27a46e746776a661ecf523c42ed0400d54 token is fake. It references closely named website (yetiswap.io) and has no relation to the official project ( yetiswap.app ).
So: yetiswap.io tries to deceive you by hyping on a legit project. Why it does that?
If you try to open yestiswap.io it will redirect you to another site — milkyswap.io:
This website has no meaningful info, fake coinmarketcap & coingecko links. The only content is swapper through which you can swap MKS token.
Milkyswap token (0x64f2c2aa04755507a2ecd22ceb8c475b7a750a3a) is the same airdrop token as yetiswap.io. And it’s also a scam.
How do they steal your money? I hope you don’t want to find out :)
But if you are interested, they gain access to you wallet and transfer any token from it to their scammer addresses. One more time: if you approve transaction with milkyswap/yetiswap — scammers will be able to steal any tokens from your wallet.
This is why these tokens are marked as phishing scams: https://desk.lsr.finance/asset/yts-yetiswap-io/
https://desk.lsr.finance/asset/mks-milkyswap-io/
(2) mmdex.io
Contract: 0xdc4cb4c3587532409a4545aa79a15d967bed1c08
As in previous cases:
- We see token that constantly aidrops
- It has just 7 days of age and more than 800,000 of holders
- Website is opaque and wants you to swap airdropped token ASAP
Remember, that legit projects make airdrops to increase awareness and to to provoke massive sellout. They want you to hold their tokens and now to swap them after airdrop.
Another important red flag — contract code is not verified on a blockchain explorer. Scammers don’t want you to know how they gonna steal tokens from your wallet.
Please note, that there are no social accounts on website. Scam doesn’t need them because it’s goal is not to grow community.
What happens if you interact with this token? Same as before: it will gain access to your wallet and steal your tokens (e.g. this tweet).
This is why it is marked as a phishing scam:
https://desk.lsr.finance/asset/mmdex-io-mmdex-io/
(3) artificial reality token
Contract: 0xd2f83cf5c697e892a38f8d1830eb88ebc0809a0c
Exactly the same story as before (you may start to notice the pattern):
- no meaningful website
- no social accounts
- no airdrop announcements
- unverified source code
- massive airdrops
What happens if you try to sell it?
First of all, you will lose money on hidden commissions. There are number of reports, e.g. example1, example2. Also there are reports that it will also steal other tokens from your wallet (as usual for airdrop scams)
This is why it is marked as a phishing scam:
https://desk.lsr.finance/asset/art-artificial-reality/
(4) other
Sadly, today there are A LOT of such scams.
BSCscan marks some of them: https://bscscan.com/tokens/label/phish-hack
Some auditors, e.g. Peckshield make announcements about identified ones: https://twitter.com/peckshield/status/1430096380945702914
LSR continuously monitors many of such sources and marks all corresponding scams as phishing on our website: https://desk.lsr.finance/ In the article above we’ve discussed 3 examples of most searched scam tokens during the last 2 weeks. But we identify far more.
During the last 3 months we’ve identified more than 100 active airdrop scams. If you see phishing alert on our website (e.g.: https://desk.lsr.finance/asset/abfin-abfin-org/) — please, stay away and don’t interact with such token.
