• Phantom, the popular Solana network wallet provider, launched Burn NFT to combat scams on the network.
• Cybercriminals are spamming users with NFTs to access their data and steal their funds.

Phantom, the Solana (SOL)-based crypto wallet for tokens, NFTs, and DeFi, announced a new feature whose primary goal is to burn non-fungible tokens from spam sent by scammers.

The most popular non-custodial web3 wallet on the Solana network said on its blog that it has been working on the development of Burn NFT, a tool specially designed to prevent its users from falling victim to scams.

“We’re still in the Wild West days of Web3. As the crypto ecosystem grows, so have the number of bad actors looking for ways to steal user’s funds,” the Phantom team stated.

The wallet provider said that “Spam is a hard problem to solve.” It explained that scammers take advantage of Solana’s low transaction fees and trick users by sending them airborne spam NFTs.

When users click on the spammy link that promises to deliver a free gift, they are taken to a site where they are asked to approve a transaction to “mint” or “claim” a free NFT or enter the seed phrase, that’s when customers lose their funds.

"These scams are becoming increasingly more sophisticated," Phantom said, adding that "scammers can change the metadata of an NFT to try to avoid being blocklisted."

To try to remedy these types of scams, the provider released the Burn NFT feature. These spam NFTs can be permanently deleted by users themselves by selecting the Burn Token feature, listed in the wallet menu.

As an incentive for using this feature, users will receive a small deposit of SOL each time. To combat unwanted NFTs, the wallet uses other methods, including blacklisting the contract address and domain of the scammer.

"Our blocklist has already 800+ mint addresses of malicious NFT collections and is integrated with how we identify scams in our siteblocking," the Phantom team said.

Likewise, the wallet is combating NFT scammers through a “phishing warning system,” which alerts customers to “any malicious transactions that could compromise their assets or permissions.”

On the Flipside

• Solana recently accused the closed-source Slope wallet of breach for massive hacking of more than 8,000 wallets resulting in losses of over $8 million.
• Regarding this theft, Phantom said on Twitter it had “reasons to believe that the reported vulnerabilities [of Phantom wallets] are due to complications related to importing accounts to and from Slope.”

Why You Should Care

• Phantom has provided the following web address for those who wish to report detected scammer sites; see the list here
• Hacks into DeFi protocols have increased this summer as have attempted spam NFT scams by the cybercriminal community that inhabits the crypto space.

You can read other articles related to this topic at:

Massive Solana Hack Drains $8M Across 8,000 Wallets

Influencers and Celebrities Promoting NFT Scams: The Bored Bunny Case