Community warns about bogus Arbitrum airdrops

Ethereum scaling solution for layer2 Arbitrum’s forthcoming “ARB” token airdrop looks to be a favorite target for fraudsters, with the community warning of hundreds of phishing schemes designed to defraud cryptocurrency users.

The Arbitrum Foundation announced on March 16 that it would distribute 10 billion governance tokens through an airdrop, letting token holders vote on code modifications. The decrease will occur on March 23.

Regrettably, several fraudsters have attempted to put up bogus token airdrops to steal cash from victims before the officially scheduled event.

Redefine, a blockchain security startup, posted on March 19 that it had discovered a website imitating the legitimate Arbitrum airdrop site. The pictures depict a website requesting access to a user’s money, which would likely result in the fraudsters emptying the wallet.

Another blockchain security company, CertiK, identified a bogus Arbitrum Twitter account with the user name “@arbitrum launch” that promotes a token airdrop. Users have been urged not to engage with it.

Likewise, on March 19, the Reddit user CryptoMaximalist created a thread warning that “scammers want to leverage on the intricacy of cryptocurrency and the eagerness of people for free money.”

According to CryptoMaximalist, they discovered bogus “Arbitrum” Twitter accounts with links to false Arbitrum websites. CryptoMaximalist advises everyone to examine a user’s profile and history before clicking on shared links.

Since the announcement of the token airdrop, Web3’s anti-scam tool Scam Sniffer has spotted more than 273 phishing sites associated with Arbitrum, and this number is projected to increase before the formal drop on March 23.

According to the Arbitrum Foundation, a scoring system was used to decide who was eligible for the token airdrop and how many tokens they might claim.

Actions such as performing more than four transactions or engaging with at least four smart contracts, bridging money into the chain Arbitrum One, and putting over $50,000 in liquidity into Arbitrum qualified as qualifying activities.

The blockchain analytics company Nansen, which collaborated with Arbitrum to design the eligibility requirements, indicated that just 625,143 of the more than 2.3 million wallets bridged on the Arbitrum One chain before February 6 are eligible for the airdrop.

“The number of tokens a wallet got in the airdrop was proportional to the number of points it accumulated,” Nansen stated in a March 16 tweet.