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Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers: A Practical Guide

A clear, data-driven guide to spotting fake airdrops and drainers.

The pattern

Fake airdrop sites copy real project branding and are promoted through hijacked X accounts, Discord announcements or ads. They ask you to connect a wallet and sign a claim.

What the signature does

Drainers request setApprovalForAll for NFTs, unlimited ERC-20 approvals, or off-chain Permit/Permit2 signatures that let the attacker move tokens without another transaction. Scam Sniffer estimated drainers stole about $295 million in 2023.

Red flags

Unusual domains, urgency countdowns, requests for seed phrases, and signature prompts referencing unknown spender addresses. Legitimate claims only need a transaction to the project's verified contract.

Protection

Bookmark official sites, use simulation wallets such as Rabby, keep holdings in a hardware wallet and use a separate burner wallet for claims.

Seed phrase security

Never type a seed phrase into a website. A 24-word BIP-39 phrase has 256 bits of entropy; a passphrase adds more, but none of it matters if you reveal the words.

By the numbers

For Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers, the reference figures are topic of Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers, level of Intermediate, updated of 2026. The comparison table below lines up red flag, why it matters — Seed phrase request: Full wallet takeover; setApprovalForAll: All NFTs transferable; Permit signature: Gasless token theft; Lookalike domain: Phishing.

Modeling Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers with the Speculative Airdrop Points FDV Calculator

The Speculative Airdrop Points FDV Calculator takes three inputs — Your share (%), Assumed FDV ($M), Airdrop share (%). Value = share × FDV × airdrop %. With its default inputs (Your share (%) = 0.01; Assumed FDV ($M) = 2000; Airdrop share (%) = 10) it returns 20,000 $; swap in the figures from Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Modeling Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers with the Seed Phrase Entropy Passphrase Analyzer

The Seed Phrase Entropy Passphrase Analyzer takes three inputs — Words, Wordlist size, Passphrase chars. Entropy = words × log₂(list) + passphrase bits. With its default inputs (Words = 24; Wordlist size = 2048; Passphrase chars = 0) it returns 264 bits; swap in the figures from Spotting Fake Airdrops and Drainers above to reproduce the scenario yourself.

Data Table

For educational and informational purposes only. Not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Figures are approximate and historical; crypto assets are volatile and you may lose capital. Do your own research.