Scammers are Exploiting Ukraine Donations

Authored by Vallabh Chole and Oliver Devane


Scammers are very quick at reacting to current events, so they can generate ill-gotten gains. It comes as no surprise that they exploited the current events in Ukraine, and when the Ukrainian Twitter account tweeted Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet addresses for donations we knew that scammers would use this as a lure for their victims.



This blog covers some of the malicious sites and emails McAfee has observed in the past few weeks.


Crypto wallet donation scams


A crypto donation scam occurs when perpetrators create phishing websites and emails that contain cryptocurrency wallets asking for donations. We have observed several new domains being created which perform this malicious activity, such as ukrainehelp[.]world and ukrainethereum[.]com.


Ukrainhelp[.]world


Below is a screenshot of Ukrainehelp[.]world, which is a phishing site asking for crypto donations for UNICEF. The website contains the BBC logo and several crypto wallet addresses.



While investigating this site, we observed that the Ethereum wallet used use was also associated with an older crypto scam site called eth-event20.com. The image below shows the current value of the crypto wallet which is worth $114,000. Interestingly this wallet transfers all its coins to 0xc95eb2aa75260781627e7171c679a490e2240070 which in turn transfers to 0x45fb09468b17d14d2b9952bc9dcb39ee7359e64d. The final wallet currently has 313 ETH which is worth over $850,000. This shows the large sums of money scammers can generate with phishing sites.



Ukrainethereum[.]com


Ukrainethereum[.]com is another crypto scam site, but what makes this one interesting is the features it contains to gain the victim’s confidence in trusting the we ..

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