Cryptocurrencies and since their emergence, hackers have devised several ways to steal them from their holders and investors.

These scammers periodically update their tools and methods.

Recently, scammers used fake QR code generators to deceptively and illegally swap the recipient’s bitcoin wallet address with theirs.

According to a recent study Posted by ZDNet, a total of nine websites involved in a service that helps cryptocurrency users convert their wallet address into QR codes, used this technology to steal $45,000 worth of bitcoin from users in one month.

How is it?

In an effort to eliminate any form of error while entering crypto wallet addresses, most crypto users try this lengthy address into an image and QR code, so that it can be easily scanned using the Bitcoin wallet app on smartphones or PC when needed.

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ZDNet reported that Harry Denley, the security manager at MyCrypto, conducted an investigation into a Bitcoin wallet QR code generator and discovered something suspicious.

In Harry’s investigation, he found that the platform converts the Bitcoin address entered by users into the equivalent of a QR code as expected, and rather associates the QR code with five different Bitcoin wallet addresses owned by the fraudsters, which have so far received funds totaling more than 7 Bitcoin equivalent to 45,000 dollars from the victims users.

This implies that all payments made through the generated QR code will be sent to the spoofed Bitcoin address instead of the user.

Additional investigations revealed that the scammers also set up eight other websites that generate Bitcoin QR codes, bringing the total to nine.

Among the sites to watch out for are the following:

bitcoin-barcode-generator.com, bitcoinaddresstoqrcode.com, bitcoins-qr-code.com, btc-to-qr.com, generate-bitcoin-qr-code.com, free-bitcoin-qr-codes.com, freebitcoinqrcodes. com, qr-code-bitcoin.com and qrcodebtc.com.

Denley mentioned that when he used the PassiveTotal tool, he discovered that the sites were hosted on three web servers: 207,244,100,241, 207,244,100,244, and 207,244,100,245.

These web servers also provide hosting for more than 450 suspicious websites.

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Although most of the sites were inactive at the time of the investigation, they did display advertisements for cryptocurrency gambling platforms.

Other fraud:

The investigation also revealed that the web servers host four sites that provide various bitcoin transaction acceleration service, and among these sites are the following:

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bitcoin-transaction-accelerator.com, transaction-accelerator.com, bitcoin-tx-transaction-accelerator.com and viabtc-transaction-accelerator.com.

Users of these platforms that claim to speed up transactions are tricked into providing a Bitcoin transaction ID, in order to expedite the transaction process and charged a fee of 0.001 BTC per transaction equivalent to $6.3.

Denley added that the BTC address where the fee is received has so far received 17.6 bitcoin ($117,000).

We have previously mentioned on the Arab Bitcoin website about an add-on that exploits Ledger wallet owners to defraud them and steal their private keys:

After the theft of 1.4 million XRP coins… Avoid this add-on so you don’t fall victim to fraud

Seeing similar topics and making sure to follow them will keep you aware of fraudulent methods and know them to avoid them in the future.

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