Researchers just uncovered 4,200 malicious smart contracts that successfully tricked 5,700 victims into signing away their crypto

Simulating transfers using safety tools inside crypto wallets can show a small gain even when the final transaction sends the user's deposit to an attacker, according to a July 30 arXiv preprint that links the technique to 5,742 victim addresses and about $3.48 million in historical losses.

The authors used SimGuard, a contract-bytecode detector, to identify 4,224 transaction-simulation phishing contracts across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche and Polygon.

The study associated them with 6,223 victim transactions but called the loss estimate an upper bound because some attacker test activity may have been misclassified. It attributed 91.5% of the losses to Ethereum and about 83% of the cross-chain total to its largest inferred cluster.

The findings have not been peer reviewed. The paper also gives inconsistent figures for its Avalanche contract count and conflicting endpoints for the observation period, leaving its per-chain breakdown and exact time window unresolved.

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