Cryptocurrency users on social media have expressed concern over a recent influx of phishing scam emails with crypto-themed content. The emails appear to have originated from the content creator platform Patreon.
Scammers have been using social media platforms X and Reddit to obtain crypto users’ email addresses to register them for Patreon. Subsequently, the compromised users have been subjected to unsolicited emails purporting to originate from bogus crypto projects hosted on the platform.
Users began to report receiving fake airdrop offers purporting to originate from Patreon creators impersonating Chainlink, Solana, Manta Network, and Sui on January 23, wherein accounts of the attempted phishing assaults emerged.
Patreon Support informed a concerned crypto community member on January 25 X that the issue, which pertained to “email verification and a follow-up from a crypto account falsely claiming to be a Patreon creator,” had been identified and resolved. The support team further stated that the affected accounts are being attended to.
Further elucidation is provided by a screenshot of an email purportedly transmitted from Patreon, which explains that the fraudulent emails were dispatched as a component of a “malicious coordinated attempt” to infiltrate users’ cryptocurrency purses, adding that the issue has been resolved.
Nevertheless, numerous other X users have reported receiving fraudulent emails for the past four days.
“Today, I deleted six Patreon emails, all of which discussed a ‘Manta’ airdrop,” u/PhaseEquivalent3529 wrote in the r/CryptoCurrency thread on Reddit on January 28.
“It is evident that the supplementary safeguards are functioning effectively,” u/fdlowe commented in the identical thread.
Phishing schemes caused $295 million in losses for more than 324,000 cryptocurrency users in 2023, according to the blockchain security platform Scam Sniffer.
