Arbitrum (ARB) Discord Compromised: How to Avoid Scam

Two days after the much-anticipated distribution of Arbitrum (ARB) tokens for early users and Arbitrum-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), scammers managed to compromise one of the channels of Arbitrum’s Discord server.

Beware: No, there are no plans for additional ARB airdrop

Today, on March 25, 2023, anonymous trader and MEV enthusiast who goes by @j_copperthwaite on Twitter shared a screenshot of Arbitrum’s (ARB) Discord channel. Malefactors gained access to it and posted a fake airdrop announcement.

Arbitrum Discord has been compromised
Do not click this link in the arbitrum discord, it is not legit! pic.twitter.com/ddXeRGq1mf

— coppers-j (@j_copperthwaite) March 25, 2023

As per this announcement, the team of Arbitrum (ARB) allegedly revealed that some requirements were not met during the March 23 airdrop. As such, the scammers said, a decision was made to organize an extra airdrop to allow all affected Arbitrum (ARB) user to “reclaim” their bonuses and rewards.

The fraudsters stated that the additional airdrop can only be accessed by the link they shared. They used the name of the original Arbitrum (ARB) ecosystem main domain name but changed one letter.

Users were asked to check their eligibility by signing a message. Obviously, it was a phishing link designed to steal seed phrases and drain funds from Arbitrum (ARB) wallets.

As covered by U.Today previously, the Arbitrum (ARB) airdrop was criticized by analysts and researchers for poor Sybil protection. Also, a number of scammers managed to exploit the “vanity addresses” vulnerability to claim ARB tokens.

Dozens of airdrop scams promoted on Twitter

Shortly after the alert by @j_copperthwaite, Arbitrum (ARB) community manager Churro 808 addressed the scam campaign. He said that it only affected the developers’ channel with technical updates and was mitigated promptly:

Dev announcement channel was the only channel hacked but it’s fixed now

Unfortunately, this is not the only way scammers are exploiting the interest in airdrops. There are numerous websites promoted on Twitter that are inviting crypto owners to claim “extra” or “special” Arbitrum (ARB) tokens. All of them are blatant scams: there are no plans for new airdrops as 1.16 billion ARB tokens are already distributed.

Besides that, a number of scams are running to promote fake airdrops of zkSync tokens, which are not live yet. Meanwhile, the prospects of the token’s release were not even mentioned by representatives of Matter Labs, zkSync’s creator, in yesterday’s Era mainnet alpha introduction.