While US President Donald Trump antagonizes Canadians with his statements that the US neighbor should become the 51st state of the US, law enforcement and regulators of both countries cooperate to disrupt crypto crime.
This time, the US Secret Service Washington Field Office has worked together with the British Columbia Securities Commission to warn victims of crypto fraud that they may have lost – or may soon lose – some of their assets.
Operation Avalanche also included various other Canadian market regulators and police departments, while undisclosed crypto trading platforms and a blockchain analysis firm played their role in the operation.
These entities have teamed up in order to find compromised crypto wallets on the ethereum (ETH) blockchain. After a wallet compromised by a so-called approval phishing scam is found, its owners are being informed that they're victims of a scam.
The announcement didn't specify how these wallets and their owners were identified or whether it included only custodial wallets, such as those controlled by crypto trading platforms.
In either case, the blockchain addresses identified during Operation Avalanche were drained of crypto assets worth an estimated $4.3 million.
"Approval phishing" is an increasingly popular scam type. Criminals are trying to trick their potential victims into granting access to a crypto wallet on blockchains such as ethereum. This is done by tricking people into signing a malicious blockchain transaction that allows the scammer to steal assets from the victim’s wallet.
As blockchain analysis company Chainalysis explained in its earlier report, approval phishers send the victim’s funds to a separate wallet from the one granted approval to make transactions on the victim’s behalf.
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