Crypto Fraudsters Use AI-Powered Fake Apps to Target Hardware Wallet Users

A massive crypto fraud operation, dubbed Operation ASTERIX, has been uncovered by Rapid7 Labs. The operation leveraged AI coding assistants to create fake Ledger, Trezor, and Exodus apps that mimicked legitimate software used for managing hardware wallets.

The researchers found a misconfigured server that exposed the entire playbook of the operation, including phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, and code to siphon stolen data out through Telegram. The server contained around 885,000 phone numbers, with the largest file being a collection of 316,002 German mobile numbers.

The operators then checked those German numbers against an account checker and confirmed that 43,066 were crypto exchange users, a hit rate of about 13.6%, almost one in seven. A further batch of 5,576 numbers was associated with Binance accounts and lined up for attack.