Solana (SOL)-based wallet provider Phantom has introduced a new feature that would burn spam non-fungible tokens (NFTs) submitted by cybercriminals.
The Phantom team claimed in a blog post on August 18 that spam NFTs have developed into a workable method for criminals attempting to steal users' money.
"The Web3 industry is still in its early stages. "The tremendous development in popularity of NFTs has led to an increasingly common technique of attack for scammers - Spam NFTs," the wallet claimed. "As the crypto ecosystem grows, so does the amount of bad actors seeking for ways to steal user's assets.
According to the wallet provider, fraudsters are airdropping spam NFTs to consumers by taking advantage of Solana's low transaction rates. These unwelcome NFTs entice visitors to click a link in exchange for a freebie.
Users are sent to a website after clicking the link, where they are "requested to approve a transaction to "mint" or "claim" a free NFT," which will result in the loss of cash.
The wallet said that scammers might "alter the metadata of an NFT to try to escape being blocklisted" and that "these scams are growing more complex."
Phantom has introduced the Burn NFT feature as a means of combating it. By choosing the Burn Token option, users can delete the unneeded NFTs. Every time they make use of this function, users will additionally receive a tiny SOL deposit.
The wallet uses several strategies in addition to the burn feature to combat spam NFTs. Phantom said that as soon as they learn about a fraudulent NFT, they immediately blacklist the contract address and domain.
Our blocklist, which is connected with how we spot frauds in our siteblocking, already has 800+ mint addresses of rogue NFT collections.
Phantom combats NFT scams by alerting users to "any fraudulent transactions that could endanger their assets or permissions" with its "phishing warning system."
According to reports, the Solana team connected the massive hack, which had impacted over 8,000 wallets and cost over USD $8 million in lost assets, to the closed-source Slope wallet.
At the time, the Phantom team added, "Phantom has grounds to suspect that the reported exploits [of Phantom wallets] are attributable to difficulties with importing accounts to and from Slope."