Hackers Target Orbiter Finance Discord Server With Fake Airdrop Scam

Various community members have reported a loss of their non-fungible tokens (NFTs), stablecoins, and other crypto tokens due to a hack in Orbiter Finance’s Discord server.

Cyber scams, especially around decentralized finance (DeFi), are almost daily affairs in 2023. Hackers posing as media representatives tricked the project and made them click on a phishing link.

Phishing Announcement in Orbiter Finance’s Discord Server

Hackers published a fake Discord announcement on Orbiter Finance’s server earlier on Thursday. Bad actors capitalized on airdrop season to trick users into connecting their wallets to a phishing website. Eventually, they stole users’ funds.

The project informed its community through a Twitter thread not to trust anything on its Discord server.

Orbiter Finance is a decentralized bridge that supports cross-rollup transfers between Ethereum and other Layer 2 blockchains such as zkSync and Arbitrum.

Source: Twitter

Community Loses Funds

The fake announcement remained on the server for over an hour, by which time the damage was done. Community members expressed frustration about trusting the project and losing funds to a scam.

Learn more about crypto scams and how to stay safe here.

While there is no exact estimate of the amount lost, various users took it to Twitter and reported the damage they suffered. A Twitter user lost their entire USDC balance on the Polygon chain, and another reported losing $4,000.

Apart from stablecoins, another user reported losing 1,300 Arbitrum (ARB) tokens worth approximately $1,950 as of writing.

Twitter user, @5poob5, lost four Milady NFTs to the phishing website. According to OpenSea data, he acquired all four NFTs for approximately 17.069 Ethereum (ETH). According to current market rates, those are worth around $31,748.

How Orbiter Finance Become Victim to Hack?

Orbiter Finance updated that someone pretending to be a team member of one of the crypto outlets reached out, wanting to publish an article about the project. They shared the link to a form that asked for basic information.

After submitting the form that now seems to be the cause of the hack, the team discovered that they could not log in to their Discord account. The scammers banned moderators and started promoting fraudulent websites.

Yesterday, another DeFi project, Pika Protocol, became a victim to hackers using a similar methodology.

The scam in space has grown so rampant that a normal search of the “Orbiter Finance” project shows a list full of fake accounts. The accounts have also jacked up their follower count, which might trick users who do not do proper due diligence.

Source: Twitter

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