Hackers Loot $500K With Hacked Vanity Addresses in Arbitrum Airdrop

26. March 2023 admin 0 Comments

• Arbitrum airdrop scheduled on March 23 resulted in the theft of $500K worth of tokens.
• The funds were stolen by an individual who generated similar vanity addresses using vanity address generators.
• As of late March 22, 61% of eligible crypto wallets have already claimed governance tokens while 37% remain unclaimed.

Arbitrum Airdrop Results in Theft of Tokens

According to recent on-chain data, hacked vanity addresses were used in looting $500K worth of tokens during the layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum airdrop scheduled on March 23. Someone who generated a list of vanity addresses that were eligible for ARB airdrops was the one who stole the tokens. Since these vanity addresses were hacked, the original owners of the ARB tokens will no longer be able to claim them.

Cryptocurrency Users Express Dismay

Several cryptocurrency users have taken to Twitter to express their dismay following the theft of their ARB tokens. Most of those impacted need to be more knowledgeable regarding the cause of the loss and have no idea how to respond appropriately.

428 Million Still Unclaimed

The token giveaway hosted by Arbitrum generated a lot of buzzes and swamped several other websites. Even with this, the blockchain analytics tool Nansen reports that there are a total of 428 million ARB tokens that still need to be claimed. As of late March 22, 61% of eligible crypto wallets had already claimed governance tokens while around 240,000 addresses still needed to do so. The 428 million unclaimed tokens represent 37% warning concerning address poisoning in January percentof the 1.1 billion ARB allotted for Arbitrum’s airdrop which is valued at close to $596 million currently (as per time writing). Some eligible addresses without claiming their tokens are part of the hacked addresses category.

What are Vanity Addresses?

A vanity address is a unique crypto address incorporating a user’s chosen phrase or word which can be generated using vanity address generators and has been used previously by fraudsters in cryptocurrencies cases such as MetaMask where users received warnings concerning address poisoning in January 2021.

Conclusion

The Arbitrum token giveaway created some buzz and caused many websites to get jammed up due its popularity however, it resulted into losses for some people after someone managed creating similar vanity addresses using generators and sending stolen funds from original owner’s wallet into his own wallet instead making away with $500k worth ARB coins . Furthermore ,outof 1 .1 Billion ARBS alloted for Airdrop , 37 % remain unclaimed as only 61 % have been successfully collected by respective owners .