Fraudsters target cryptocurrency under the guise of a fake airdrop from Coinbase

Cyber ​​attackers impersonate Coinbase’s Base sidechain to steal cryptocurrencies. About it on Twitter warned PeckShield analysts. It turned out that the scammers even managed to get the verification icon on Twitter for the fake Base page.

#PeckShieldAlert Our community contributor has detected @BuildOnBase with a yellow tick is a forged #twitter account, not the real @BuildOnBase
base[.]web3claiming[.]com is the phishing site, Fake_Phishing38689 created the contract “Claimer” https://t.co/Iw1FdVPgd5 ~6 days ago pic.twitter.com/ThQ1ub8fOi

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 6, 2023

On the fake site base[.]web3claiming[.]com, which exactly repeats the original, scammers offer victims to connect a wallet supposedly to distribute BASE tokens. When trying to connect the wallet, the site requests access rights to the wallet funds on behalf of the smart contract 0x59…1b11F. According to PeckShield, the founder of the smart contract is Fake_Phishing38689. Whether the smart contract has malicious functions is not specified. However, according to stories transfers of the smart contract, the attacker was able to withdraw more than 0.7 ETH (~$1120) from it. All other addresses, when trying to “receive” BASE tokens, actually gave their cryptocurrency to the smart contract.

According to data reg.ru website, the web3claiming.com domain was registered on March 4, 2023 by a certain Anastasia Tolkach through the reg.com website. Whether she was behind the creation of the base subdomain is not clear. The editors found that the email address provided when registering web3claiming.com is also used when purchasing other domain names, including skins2u.fun, emiswap.space and connection-web3.com. In all cases, the Russian domain name registrar reg.ru was used.

At the end of February, the American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced its own sidechain based on Optimism * called Base. It is expected that the novelty will become a cross-chain bridge through which users will be able to connect to various sidechains of the Ethereum ecosystem.

At the same time, it is still unclear whether Coinbase plans to issue its own token to manage the project. For example, Binance’s Ethereum fork called BNB Chain (formerly Binance Smart Chain) has a BNB token. However, Coinbase did not make any announcements about the native token for its sidechain. The exchange only hinted that they intend to share Base commission income with the Optimism development team.

• Optimism is an open source Layer 2 (L2) solution for the Ethereum blockchain. The purpose of the platform is to solve the scalability issues of Ethereum, due to which network users face high fees and transaction delays. The project is being developed by the non-profit organization Optimism Foundation.
• However, Optimism is far from the only L2 solution for Ethereum. There are a number of analogues on the market, including Loopring and Arbitrum.