Ethereum has been hit by a new scam with Altcoins Ethereum Nowa (ETN) and Ethereum classic vision (ECTV) appropriating user’s private keys of users trying to redeem their allegedly forked coins. The suspected scam was unearthed by a report by the Guarda wallet development team on January 11.
The Ethereum Nowa project’s official website which doesn’t have a white paper- describes the process of obtaining ETN, as first sending ETH to an address and then export the private key and then redeeming the crypto-currency using the dedicated online tool
The Guarda wallet team alerted users about the scam by posting the following;
A user on Ethereum block explorer, Etherscan has commented on the aforementioned address, asserting that the address is engaging in a “scam [hard] fork/airdrop” after warning “Don’t send anything here.” The tool to claim the coins appears to be a clone of the well-known online Ethereum (ETH) wallet MyEtherWallet (MEW), featuring the original logo, website title and page under a different domain
The difference between the original MEW interface and the cloned one is that all the options that let the user chose how to access the wallet was greyed out, other than the one that allows the user to paste in their private key.
According to the Guarda wallet team, Ethereum Nowa “is a way for the thieves to get your private information and gain access to your wallet.” Ethereum classic’s website indicated that its hard fork was happening last Friday and also included a downloadable wallet for both Linux and windows. The website read;
“Regardless of which authorized wallet you use to hold your ETH, your free ETCV will be initially sent to the official Ethereum Classic Vision wallet. While we are currently in negotiations with a number of popular wallets, at the moment of the fork we will not be able to send ETCV to those wallets due to certain differences in the algorithms used.”
After noting that this project was better than the ETN, the Guarda wallet reportedly found out that the ECTV team had also appropriated the private keys of the users. The Guarda wallet team went on to notify users on this by stating that;
“The analysis on the code performed by our team has shown that the piece of code provided actually sends your private key data on the Ethereum Classic Vision servers, masking it as an API token.” mQ�k��^���
