Warning: Fake Wasabi Wallet Appears On The Market

Warnings are issued on almost every major crypto news website after a fake version of the Wasabi wallet appeared on the market that is probably designed to steal bitcoins.

Nopara73 who is a Wasabi developer which is the only one, who has confirmed his identity, claims that the website for the fake wallet is only aiming to assault Windows users because only that version of the wallet is the illegitimate one. The rest of the links available for download go to the official Wasabi Github repository.

According to the developer, he managed to download the off-brand version of the wallet and claims that the software he uses for virus detection has no problem with the wallet which makes the problem even bigger. A compromised Bitcoin wallet can damage someone’s investment and cost someone everything he has. However, this is not the first wallet to have a copycat. Electrum also had a fake copy of itself but the community was quick just as it is now to warn people.

Open source software has this major issue that allows everyone to create a clone and this is the wanted effect hackers want to get out of using it. For this reason, if open source developers are able to find the person behind this problem they have the ability to use their licensing agreement and sue whoever is behind the clone because of the GNU public license. Unfortunately, these kinds of lawsuits are rare.

The good thing is that the popularity of the real wallet has spiked and it is the first wallet that offers ‘’coin joining’’ which is one of the first wallets to support this method using Bitcoins.

The actual distribution of how much the wallet is used is pretty difficult to find out despite the transparency of the network. Many wallets use backend or are able to connect to a node remotely as most of the mobile wallets do. Wasabi is one of the wallets that is most popular in Iran and according to the users, using cryptocurrency is still kind of illegal in the country despite Iran launchings its own cryptocurrency.

Creating a fake version of a popular Bitcoin wallet poses a major financial risk mainly if someone wants to change its wallet option and imports the funds using the private key. Luckily, the news for this fake wallet seems to be spreading fast and it is unlikely for the scam to succeed.