Draining Crypto Wallet NFTs
To mint a new NFT. Whenever possible, always use a burner wallet aka disposable, or an almost empty wallet. Why? Because some NFT Founders are not as ethical as you would believe.
From time to time, we will encounter Wallet Drainer news. This article was created upon discovering a wallet drainer NFT mint, Yosei.xyz. For more detailed happening, Search Twitter with their username @Yosei_NFT: https://twitter.com/search?q=%20%40Yosei_NFT&src=typed_query
One red flag of such projects is that the founders are unknown. That allows them to "escape" but usually there are ways to track them down if the police or Interpol are going to go after them.
One good way is also not to be the first to mint, but then again the lure of getting that #1 or low number can be too appealing for some.
Another problem is that these codings can be bought and deployed by anyone. Some are even free as the commission for the coding is embedded within the codes such as the one explained below...
How a Wallet Drainer Works?
Here's another Twitter Thread on the technical side of things and how a drainer works, should you be interested.
How to Protect Your Wallet Against Drainers?
There are extensions on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Brave, and Edge, that could help to "read" the contract that you are about to sign and warns you of any malicious coding. Examples of such extensions are as follow:
For full transparency, I am with MintDefense, as it was created by fellow NFT community members and at one-time payment for usage of the lifetime of the software. I was looking beyond launches of NFT projects and more on the future mass adoptions.
What Some Scammers Would Do?
Sometimes they would even trick you to a fake website that looks like the real one to get you to sign your assets over. For this, understanding a website address structure and the ability to recognize the genuine link has protected me from such incidents.
Here's my own encounter of a scammer who i followed on Twitter as he was collaborator of an NFT project launch, which turns out he has nothing to do with the project.
The problem with the "NFT game" to try for a whitelist is that you would be following, liking, and retweeting about people you don't know. And one fine day, they could try to cash in on you.
He invited me to his Discord server where i am supposed to verify my wallet. But instead of the actual collab.land website link to carry out the verification. The link was going somewhere else, for example colab.land. A missing alphabet L can mean a world of difference.
Some scammers would even go to the extent of using the actual link characters in a subdomain to mislead people to their sites. Example collab.land.******.com.
So maybe staying out of the "degen" NFT game, especially in a bear market, could be a good way to protect oneself from such scams but you will also definitely miss out on the next blue chip NFT.
