Unmasking the Shadow Economy: A Deep Dive into Drainer-as-a-Service Phishing on Ethereum

Abstract

The prosperity of Ethereum gives rise to a new type of transaction-based phishing scam. Specifically, users are tempted to visit phishing websites and sign phishing transactions that allow scammers to withdraw their tokens. Meanwhile, to accelerate the deployment of phishing websites, scammers have introduced a business model, Drainer-as-a-Service (DaaS). In this model, drainer operators focus on crafting specialized phishing toolkits, named ''wallet drainers'', while drainer affiliates handle the deployment and promotion of phishing websites. After stealing victims' tokens, they will distribute profits. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of DaaS on Ethereum. To begin with, we propose a snowball sampling approach to build the first large-scale DaaS dataset, including 1,910 profit sharing contracts, 56 operator accounts, 6,087 affiliate accounts, and 87,077 profit-sharing transactions. Then, we analyze the scale of DaaS from the perspectives of victims, operators, and affiliates, and perform clustering analysis to uncover dominant DaaS families. Finally, we reported DaaS accounts in the dataset and 32,819 phishing websites deployed with DaaS toolkits to the community. Our work aims to serve as a guide for Ethereum service providers to enhance user protection against DaaS.