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A New Kind of Impersonation Scam

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January 31, 2025 · 5 min read

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The landscape of online scams is always evolving with scammers constantly changing tactics and finding new ways to deceive their victims. Impersonation scams are not new, but the style and methodology constantly changes and adapts. These days the average person is more aware than ever of the constant threat of scams, with initiatives like the National Anti-Scam Centre’s new awareness campaign and more attention from the media on this issue everyone knows to be on the lookout for scammers. But with so much money involved in the operation of these scams, criminals are always trying to find new ways of deceiving their victims and are constantly coming up with new types of scams. Understanding how these scams operate and how to identify them can help you stay safe.

Today we want to highlight a new kind of scam that has been brought to the attention of Cybertrace and show how it operates and what can be done to identify scams of this kind.

The Scam

This scam is a variation of an impersonation scam where the fraudsters attempt to imitate a real company or entity’s website to deceive the user into entering personal information into the fake website. The fake websites are made by copying the real website making the fake website appear almost identical.

Below is a picture of the real website “flare.network” followed by the fake website “flarenet.portal-app.sbs/restore/”.

The home page of the website flare.network, a blockchain related entity. The page is a white page with blue text that reads Connect Everything.
The home page of the website flarenet.portal-app.sbs a fradulent website that is impersonating the website flare.network.

At first glance, these websites look extremely similar and without knowing that one of them is fake it would be easy to mistake it for the real thing. This is fairly typical of an impersonation scam but in this instance, the fraudsters are attempting to gain access to the victim’s cryptocurrency wallet.

On the fake website, we can see a button that reads “Connect”, when this is clicked the victim is taken to a list of cryptocurrency wallet services as seen below. The scammers are trying to convince the victim that they are linking their wallet to the platform a fairly common practice when using crypto services.

A screenshot of a webpage displaying a list of cryptocurrency wallets.

However, once the wallet service is selected the victim is taken to a page to ‘Import the wallet’, this page requests that the user enter the recovery phrase for their wallet.

A phishing website that is asking the user to enter the Recovery Phrase of their Ledger Wallet.

Once the scammers have the Recovery phrase they have complete access to the wallet and can transfer all cryptocurrency out of the victim’s wallet.

This is just one of many of these types of websites identified while our team looked into flarenet.portal-app.sbs Cybertrace identified numerous other impersonation websites. Here are some of the other websites we identified that appear to be operated by the same scammers,

coredao.network-sync.sbs
coredao.org-syncs.sbs
flare.portal-app.sbs
flarenet.portal-app.sbs/
org-syncs.sbs
pulsechain.com-app.sbs
solana.pro-app.sbs
stacks.co-chain.sbs

stacks.co-app.sbs
swell.network-sync.sbs
teramoney.io-sync.sbs
thetatoken.connect-ddns.sbs
thetatoken.apps-ddns.sbs
walletconnecting.io-net chain.sbs
walletconnect.hash-io.sbs
wallconnectsync.ddnsking.com

How Scammers Find Their Victims

The scammers do not just wait for victims to find these fake websites they are actively looking for people who are users of the real platforms they are impersonating. Cybertrace has had reports of users being approached by scammers on the social media channels of these platforms. By approaching members of the social media groups they are likely to find people who are already users of the platforms the scammers are impersonating.

In this instance, the scammers may approach members of the Flare Network Discord or Telegram groups and direct them to the scam website. They will often impersonate other members of groups such as the admins or moderators by copying their account names and profile pictures and then interact with other members of the group. Victims will then be directed to the fake website where the scammers will walk them through the process of ‘Importing their wallet’.

How To Protect Yourself From These Kinds Of Scams

Being familiar with the different types of scams and the way fraudsters operate makes it easier to identify suspicious behaviour. Here are a few helpful tips for avoiding this particular kind of scam.

  • Always be careful of links that have been provided to you, it is often safer to go directly to the website you want to access rather than click on a link someone has sent you.

  • Look at the website URL, impersonation websites often have suspicious or unusual URLs. Googling the company you think you are dealing with and look at the URL of the website if the URLs don’t match then something is wrong.

  • Be careful when interacting with people online even if they appear to be an admin or moderator. Online platforms like Discord will list the admins of the group, check that you are talking to who you think you are. If you think someone is impersonating an admin report them.

  • Never give anyone your cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrase, this should always be kept private and safe. 

  • If a website or platform appears suspicious do some research before providing any personal information. Cybertrace regularly publishes lists of fraudulent websites so this can be a good place to start.

How Cybertrace Can Help

Cybertrace is here to help, we specialise in scam investigations and have a range of services to help victims of fraud. If you have been the victim of a scam involving Cryptocurrency our Cryptocurrency Tracing service can help track down the funds and our Forensic Website Investigation service can help to identify the scammers behind the website. So if you think you have been the victim of a scam or suspect a platform may not be what it appears to be, then contact our scam investigators today.

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