Solana Scam Watch: Permanent Delegate Function Used to Burn Tokens—Stay Alert!

A new scam is disrupting on Solana and everyone should be aware of it as people can have their tokens burned inside their own wallets without noticing it. This is an uncover from slorg, a Jupiter dev, after someone on the community alerted about tokens that he swapped but never landed into his wallet.

They did a basic investigation and the team come with a resolution on that, and discovered that scammers are using a token burn mechanism triggered after activating a method that gives an wallet address authority to burn the tokens when they got swapped. Imagine that you have stablecoins on Solana and want to swap into another promising token. You will then use the exchange inside your phantom (or another wallet) to swap it, but after you swap the tokens won't come and all your stablecoins are gone.

The scammers use a "permanent delegate" function that gives an address authority over a supply allowing any token to be burn at their desire. It's a legit mechanism used by devs on Solana but the scammers are using it more sophisticated to burn tokens they choose when targeting someone and get their tokens for free.

You can be asking (as I did), what the scammers earn from it as they are burning those tokens. First they are targeting people and manipulating tokens supplies as each time they use the "permanent delegate" they can burn any token they get hands on. They steal from people whom their swap to and burn the supply at same time.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, I still thinking about) some exchanges or protocols have this extension trigger warning, meaning that if people interact with a token with "permanent delegate" status it will alert the user. The unfortunately part is that not many of those exchanges yet have the alert tools feature so plenty of people can still be robbed and got their coins burnt without noticing.

Always be careful and interact with tokens that you dealt in the past or from a community that is trustable in this wild wild crypto. Be informed and alert to never lose anything that matters. Remember:

CONTENT IS KING!