My EOS Wallet recently updated its spam filters with big upgrades for users and bad news for scammers.

We’ve been reading stories daily of users being tricked into visiting phishing sites for ECAF or the Telos Foundation and were quickly relieved of their funds by unscrupulous thieves. But what can we do as a community to combat these scams?

Educating users on best practices never hurts but these lessons usually come at a high price, and as others have tested, even tech savvy users can be phished.

Block Explorers

A lot of these phishing scams start with on-chain transactions, and are delivered to users via the platform they trust the most, their wallet or account page on block explorers.

A popular scam these days is to send an eos transfer with the minimum balance and a memo containing a phishing URL to a fake site claiming to be the Telos Foundation or ECAF. Let’s compare how the various block explorers handle one of these transactions:

Bloks (bloks.io)

An EOS transaction containing a phishing URL to the “Telos Fuon-dation” on bloks.io with their “Spam Filter” enabled

Using only the default settings on one of the most popular block explorers we can see that not only is this not considered spam, but “Hide Small Balances” which is one of the most basic methods of detecting spam is not selected by default.

EOSX (eosx.io)

The same transaction viewed from EOSx once the “Hide Small Amounts” was disabled

In order to view this transaction on EOSx.io you had to disable “Hide Small Amounts” setting which is a good step, spam shouldn’t be viewable by default… There’s a reason emails sort them into the Junk Folder. However for some reason even with their “Hide Spam” option enabled it didn’t seem to catch the suspicious transaction.

The same transaction viewed from MEOW only viewable once the Spam Filter is disabled

MEOW hid the transaction by default! And even when the “Spam Filter” setting was toggled off the transaction was clearly flagged as dangerous. Any user casually scrolling through their history would see this and have no doubt that the URL indicated is not legitimate.

Desktop Wallets

After reviewing a few desktop wallets like EOS Voter & FairyWallet it was clear they don’t provide any transaction filtering features so did not make it on this list. Instead most desktop wallets redirected users to block explorers for viewing transactions.