Binance
customers may have received an SMS last week encouraging them to participate in
a new lottery to win up to 100 EUR in cryptocurrencies.
Although
these texts appeared in threads with official announcements from the exchange,
they turned out to be scams. The platform is aware of such phishing attempts
but admits it is powerless to stop them.
At the end
of last week, Binance customers received SMS messages about winning in the
“Binance Mystery Box.” The texts further informed that up to €100 in
tokens were available for claiming and that the offer was expiring on the same
day.
There is
confirmed evidence that Binance clients located in Poland received fraudulent
SMS messages attempting to steal their account information. Multiple Polish
Binance users, in discussions with Finance Magnates, validated that they
had personally received these phishing texts.
The
screenshot below shows a suspicious SMS that appeared in the same thread as
other messages delivered by Binance regarding login codes or account
verification processes.
The article continues under the screenshot:
Fake Binance SMS
Furthermore,
posts on social media also document the receipt of fraudulent offers. Some comments
even suggested there might have been a potential data leak concerning phone
numbers, although the exchange claims no such infringement occurred.
Hello there, thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Kindly disregard this message, it’s not from Binance and do NOT click on the link in the message as it may confirm trojan/virus to your device/account.
What you received is called SMS Spoofing Attacks.
The attacker…— Binance Customer Support (@BinanceHelpDesk) January 11, 2024
Finance
Magnates asked the Polish branch of Binance to comment on this matter. The company
said that to eliminate SMS security loopholes, modifying the entire GSM
technology system would be necessary, which “seems unrealistic” to the
company.
When we
asked a local cryptocurrency expert about encountering such scams in Poland, he
mentioned that he had never experienced these fraudulent SMS messages locally.
However, he noted that this scam is frequently seen in other countries.
The Origin of the Fake SMS
Scam
In response
to Finance Magnates, Binance explains that the GSM system, which SMS
messages operate on, allows the sender to fill in the “sender name”
field arbitrarily. Standard SMS applications and tools typically insert the
sender’s phone number in this field. However, entities like…
