Beware of fake Arbitrum Airdrops, warns the community

Ethereum Layer 2 Scaling Solution Arbitrum’s upcoming “ARB” token Airdrop seems to have become a popular target for scammers, with the community warning of hundreds of phishing scams aimed at deceiving crypto users.

Announced in a March 16 post by the Arbitrum Foundation, the airdrop will send out 10 billion governance tokens via a token airdrop, allowing holders to vote on code changes. The airport is set for March 23.

Unfortunately, the development has led to more than a few attempts by scammers to set up fake token airdrops aimed at stealing funds from victims ahead of the officially scheduled event.

Blockchain security company Redefine in a March 19 mail said it found a site that purports to be an official Arbitrum airdrop site. The screenshots show a user being asked by the site to provide access to their money, which presumably will cause the scammers to empty their wallet.

CertiK, another blockchain security firm pointed to a fake Arbitrum Twitter account with the username “@arbitrum_launch” – advertising a token Airdrop. It has warned users not to interact with it.

Meanwhile, Reddit user CryptoMaximalist posted a thread on March 19, warning that “scammers hope to exploit the complexity of crypto and users who are happy for free money.”

According to CryptoMaximalist, they found fake “Arbitrum” Twitter profiles with links to fake Arbitrum websites, and advised everyone to check a user’s profile and history, and check for spamming links across many subreddits before clicking on shared links.

Last week, Web3 anti-scam tool Scam Sniffer told its Twitter followers that it had already discovered more than 273 phishing sites related to Arbitrum since the token airdrop was announced, with the number expected to rise before the official drop on March 23.

According to the Arbitrum Foundation, a points system was used to determine who could claim the token airdrop and how many they could claim.

Related: Navigating the Crypto World: Tips to Avoid Scams

Qualifying actions included completing more than four transactions or interacting with at least four smart contracts, bridging funds to the Arbitrum One chain, and depositing more than $50,000 in liquidity to Arbitrum.

Blockchain analytics firm Nansen, which helped develop the criteria with Arbitrum, revealed that of more than 2.3 million wallets connected to the Arbitrum One chain before February 6, only 625,143 are eligible for the airdrop.

“Organic activity gave positive (behavior to encourage) or negative behavior to discourage) points. The number of tokens a wallet received in the airdrop was a function of how many points it collected,” Nansen explained in a tweet on March 16.