GoPlus Security Reminder：Beware of Inscription Scams
As the price of ORDI breaks through historical highs, surpassing a market value of 1 billion U.S. dollars, with the highest increase reaching thousands of times, the ecosystem of Bitcoin and various BRC20 inscriptions have entered a frenzied bull market. The user security leader, GoPlus, has identified a variety of scams utilizing these inscriptions, and listed below a compilation of typical inscription scam cases. Please be cautious during transactions to avoid financial losses.
Phishing Websites
The scam group imitated and forged the popular engraving wallet platform Unisat. The official address of Unisat is https://unisat.io, but the scam group used the domain https://unisats.io, which adds just one extra letter to the official address, making it difficult for users to distinguish . Subsequently, scammers purchased Google’s keyword search service, causing the phishing website to appear at the top when users search for ‘Unisat’. Many users were deceived by this and lost Ethereum and Bitcoin.”
Real vs. Fake Inscriptions
Although inscription trading is extremely popular, many of the trading infrastructures remain imperfect. For example, on the trading platform with the domain https://evm.ink/tokens, users would encounter a large number of inscriptions with the same name when they enter the website. Many users were unable to tell the specific differences in the protocols and eventually purchased the wrong targets.
Additionally, scammers would add invalid fields to forge authentic inscription series when the ‘p’ field protocol are the same, . These deceptive inscriptions are concealed very well, if users are not careful, they will fall victim to these scams easily.
Not only token-type inscriptions, but NFT-type inscriptions also face similar issues. Scammers can easily inscribe an identical image, with the only difference in authenticity being a different serial number. Therefore, when purchasing, it is crucial to determine whether the serial number falls within the series of the intended purchase target. Similar scam tactics were also quite common in the early Ethereum NFT market.
Mint Traps
This is a new type of scam. Due to the current proliferation of inscription on many public chains, users often receive a large number of new targets for inscription in a short period. Scam teams exploit users’ FOMO, set up Mint contracts on some less popular chains, and get users to interact with these contracts. Users would eventually find out that what they received is not inscription, but NFT. Scammers will set high purchase taxes in the interaction contracts, leading users to unknowingly lose their assets.
Let’s take an example of the one on the Sui chain: https://suiexplorer.com/object/0xdd9272210c44244c3dea8107a5ab4e40600ff1ff12f9f8161feb43f1770ebf63. This is actually an NFT disguised as an inscription, where users will pay some SUI to this scammer each time they mint one. Through this scammer received over 5000 SUI in just one hour.
Dangerous Hex
Recently, GoPlus has also noticed many dangerous Mint messages in various user communities, as exemplified by this group chat screenshot:
In many cases, as soon as such messages are posted, users will eagerly follow the instructions. Many users even use inscription script tools, directly copy and paste their private keys and transaction-related information, then execute these actions in bulk.
This behavior is very dangerous because scammers can easily construct JSON fields for transferring inscriptions and encode them as hex for users to inscribe. After it is completed, users’ inscriptions could be stolen. Scammers can also set the object of the minted inscription to be a fake inscription token that they deployed, users, after spending high gas fees, will find that the inscription they minted is not what they originally intended.
About GoPlus
GoPlus is the first customer security data service provider, supporting the risk-detecting engine with a maximum of 30m+ calls each day. GoPlus has the first open sourced asset contract risk classification standard and the largest contract attack sample library of the world, and has became the token and NFT security monitoring service with the highest detection accuracy and strongest service ability in the web3 world. GoPlus has been offer sustainable user security data service to 200+partners including CoinmarketCap、Coingecko、Dextool、DexScreener、Ave、Opera Crypto browser、Safepal, Bitgit Wallet, Token Pocket, MetaMask Snaps and others.
