Phantom wallet holders are now being targeted in a series of phishing alerts that aim to steal their keys and gain access to their accounts. The alerts are pop-ups asking users to carry out updates on their accounts.
According to a post shared by scam detection platform Scam Sniffer, criminals are now attempting to connect to legitimate users on the platform. The platform mentioned that they are using a fake ‘update extension’ to gain access to the user’s accounts by tricking them into releasing their private keys.
Scammers target Phantom Wallet amid rise in popularity
Phantom Wallet has recorded a massive rise in user adoption rate since the beginning of the year due to a rapid rise in the number of tokens being developed on the platform. The rapid increase in users is one of the leading reasons why criminals are targeting the platform, as they hope to strike gold with their new user base. According to DefiLlama, the platform registered $470,000 in revenues over the last 24 hours, moving ahead of Coinbase. The development is coming after the platform registered a daily revenue of $3.6 million on January 19.
The crypto wallet, based on Solana, also registered some astonishing figures in 2024, seeing more than 10 million monthly active users and 850 million transactions. The wallet recently raised $150 million in Series C funding led by Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, coming after it announced multi-currency support for 16 different currencies. According to a January 17 announcement by its team, the company is now valued at $3 billion.
Crypto users lose $10 million to phishing attacks in January
The recent announcement is coming after a Scam Sniffer thread on X, where it mentioned that about 9,220 users lost more than $10 million to phishing attacks in January. The platform added that the figure is a stark drop of 56% from the $23.58 million that users lost to the criminals in December 2024. Scam Sniffer added that Ethereum was hit the hardest, with its users losing more than $8 million, about 80% of the funds, to the attacks.
In addition, blockchains such as BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Polygin, and Optimism were also affected. Phantom Wallet initially warned of these kinds of attacks on January 31, asking users to refrain from entering their recovery phrase on a third-party website. It also mentioned the steps that investors can take to identify potential scam attacks. Some of these steps include right-clicking on the website because most of these websites remove the ability.