Drainer websites are becoming 9-figure revenue opportunities for scammers.
They imitate real web3 platforms, and deceive victims into signing malicious transactions to steal everything they have.
But how successful are they?
The scariest part is how far a single motivated group was able to scale.
The 'Inferno Drainer' group made over 16,000 unique domains over the course of 2 years.
They'd create high quality phishing websites that spoofed real web3 protocols to coerce victims into signing transactions.
The amount they made was shocking:
In these 2 years they were able to make almost $90 million dollars from 137,000 victims.
Using the affiliate drainer program — they would propagate the tech and know-how for a cut of the take. Usually around 20-30%.
People would act as the social signal to nab individuals on the ground level, and day after day many would grind it out as they would a career.
And it makes sense because of how much "revenue" they were generating.
Although this was one of the larger ones, the total amount stolen across 2023 by similar drainers was $300 million taken from more than 320,000 victims.
These drainer sites are pushed on Discord and Twitter, promising users some sort of reward — usually an airdrop.
This service model is extremely lucrative because it means that individuals don't even need the technical skills to set it up anymore.
They merely need to possess social skills to trick victims.
Hopefully over time, we can have program-level solutions such as
@jacobdotsol's Lighthouse when it releases later this year.
Until then, stay on alert.
Don't go to websites random people DM you, or sites embedded in NFT metadata — or you could be next.