Crypto News: Ethereum’s primary blockchain explorer, Etherscan, has made some changes to its platform that masks zero-value token transfers by default. This comes in response to reports of rampant address poisoning scams that have targeted and spammed unsuspecting users. As of now, users will have to go to the settings page of the Etherscan website to view such tokens in order to manually turn on the display.
What Is Address Poisoning?
Address poisoning is a type of phishing scam that can affect people who have obtained undesired tokens and who do not take the time to check their addresses before transferring cryptocurrency. To “poison” a user’s token, an attacker will send a useless token to the user’s address with a value close to zero or no value at all. After that, the transaction will be logged in the history of the crypto wallet, where it will be open for selection whenever a transfer is being made.
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The goal of the con is to deceive the user into unintentionally sending crypto to the address related to the con. Cybercrooks use sophisticated software to generate fake wallet addresses that, at first glance, are almost indistinguishable from “poisoned” ones. These bogus addresses are said to have the same few characters at the start or end.
Etherscan Hides Zero-Value Tokens
In order to combat such attacks, Etherscan has disabled the visibility of zero-value token transfers. By doing this, attackers are unable to gain access, while users are prevented from sending tokens to such poisoned addresses. Nonetheless, users are still able to check their zero-value balances at any time by disabling the feature in the site’s settings.
In the wake of this crypto news, the crypto community has responded with positive feedback for the new change, and they are now looking for other block explorers to implement the same feature. Likewise, Ledger, a company that produces blockchain hardware wallets, recommends that users quickly hide their unwanted NFT collections as soon as they receive them.
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