A Polymarket dealer has misplaced tons of of hundreds of {dollars} in crypto due to a Uniswap phishing advert that appeared on the prime of a Google search consequence. Tons of of associates and associates stuffed up the remark part with condolences.
The founding father of DefiLlama broadcasted the horrible story as a warning to the crypto group.
The founding father of Uniswap – the actual Uniswap – repeated that warning, “These scams are horrible, we’ve been fighting them for years.” He referred to as the disturbing business of pretend web sites that depend on advertisements to lure crypto traders “the ad economy” and implored that it “needs to go.”
Uniswap is a typical method for crypto merchants to trade digital tokens with out trusting a centralized crypto trade with custody of their funds.
The six-figure loss is the most recent instance in an ongoing collection the place scammers purchase Google Advertisements to direct customers to fraudulent, lookalike web sites that mimic actual crypto interfaces like Uniswap. Victims click on the advert, join their pockets, and signal a malicious transaction. That approval grants the ability to empty belongings or make trades from the pockets.
For years, fraudulent Google search advertisements have led customers to phishing pages that impersonate well-known crypto apps.
Uniswap phishing scam-as-a-service
The actual pockets drainer device used on this assault was AngelFerno. This ‘scam-as-a-service’ pockets drainer script targets DeFi customers, together with prior front-end assaults that impersonated OpenEden and Curvance web sites.
AngelFerno is dwell on a number of domains which are itemized on GitHub phishing blocklists. Customers mustn’t navigate to them.
Notably nefarious attackers use Cyrillic characters in URLs, also called Punycode URLs, to make the pretend area seem visually indistinguishable from the actual URL.
Chainalysis and different safety researchers have flagged Google phishing advertisements as a serious assault vector. In July 2025, for instance, a DeFi person misplaced $1.2 million via an almost similar Uniswap rip-off involving fraudulent Google Advertisements.
Forensic investigator ZachXBT referred to as for extreme penalties in opposition to Google for failing to forestall phishing advertisements.
Protos has reached out to the sufferer for affirmation concerning the mid-six-figure and “entire net worth” estimate of his loss however didn’t obtain a direct response previous to publication. The sufferer has mentioned publicly that he misplaced six figures after being fooled by a Google advert.
