Risks on centralized exchanges, chances of earning airdrops from applications, etc., push crypto investors to use decentralized wallets. Investors wanting full control over their assets have valid reasons. However, ensuring the security of these wallets also poses a serious problem.
What are Revoke and Rabby?
Attackers are developing completely different methods every passing day and trapping their victims. Revoke and Rabby issued an important warning about the latest scam method. Investors who use wallets like MetaMask, Trust Wallet use both platforms to enhance their security. These 2 platforms help you remove suspicious permissions from your wallet. If you have interacted your wallet with a contract belonging to the scammers, you can prevent the potential victimization you will experience in the future by safely removing the permissions.
Scamming with Fake Token
You saw a suspicious approval in your wallet or noticed that a fake token has arrived in your wallet via airdrop. The thing to do to reduce your risk is to go to one of the two platforms above and clear suspicious permissions. However, attackers hunt you right here with the method they have newly developed.
Years ago, when gas fees started to rise on Ethereum, the concept of “gas tokens” was developed. These gas tokens used a feature that allowed the EVM to refund gas while cleaning storage. This allowed users to mint gas tokens when fees were low and burn them when fees were high, effectively “locking” the lower fee. This was an unintended side effect of storage gas refunds and was made unimplementable with EIP-3529 in 2021.
How Does it Work?
However, several other EVM Chains, including the BNB Chain, still have this gas tokens concept that scammers misuse. These scammers created fake tokens with airdrop and created fake approvals for these tokens that people thought they needed to cancel.
But scammers programmed these fake tokens to mint a large number of gas tokens during the cancellation process. These gas tokens are then sent to the scammers who can sell them. This is a frightening situation because it shows you paid just a high fee, not that you sent money in your wallet.
How Can You Protect Yourself?
Scammers create fake approvals and trick users into cancelling these approvals with a high gas fee. Other than the high gas fee, these approvals will not affect your valuable assets or add new approvals. Rabby and Revoke have taken the necessary precautions on this new method. However, investors need to pay attention to the following two things when canceling permissions.
- When you want to cancel permissions, you have to pay a gas (transaction fee) that is 100 times more than normal.
- Gas tokens or fake tokens coming as airdrop usually have no logos.
By paying attention to the two items above, you can understand whether you have become the target of scammers with the new method. If you encounter such a problem, do not try to pay a 100-fold transaction fee to cancel fake permissions. The sophisticated method tells us that more complex methods may target investors in the future. Therefore, investors should never let go of their skepticism when using their decentralized wallets.
