The scam attempted to take advantage of USDC’s post-depeg recovery.
On March 16, a phishing campaign falsely promising access to a new USDC DeFi trading platform emerged on social media.
Fake USDC trading platforms emerge
The fake blog post promoting the swap platform was located at http-circle-dot-blog, and the fake trading platform was located at http-circledefi-dot-center.
The fraudulent platform allegedly allowed users to exchange Circle’s USDC stablecoin for Tether’s competing USDT stablecoin and claimed to have established a partnership with TRON DAO. Its interface appeared to be based on the legitimate DeFi platform Raydium.
It is unclear how much money was sent to the fraudulent service.
Reddit mainly spread the phishing site. While it did not reach /r/cryptocurrency, it was shared on /r/USDC and about 20 other subreddits.
Interestingly, the scammers initially tried to gain traction on /r/Buttcoin, where they attracted a large number of comments. The scammers may have hoped that the subreddit’s skepticism toward cryptocurrencies would cause commenters to overlook the details of the scam.
A Circle spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the sites were fraudulent, but declined to say what action it would take. The company also issued a recent tweet advising users to "beware of scammers and fraudsters using fake accounts."
Circle’s USDC stablecoin remains strong
Circle’s official blog, located at www.circle.com/blog, was last updated on March 15 and made no mention of DeFi products in its latest update.
The scam appears to be trying to capitalize on USDC’s recovery after it lost parity with the U.S. dollar. USDC’s price dropped as low as $0.88 on March 11 before returning to $1.00 on March 13 after it decoupled from the peg following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
During that recovery, Circle claimed it was working to strengthen USDC by clearing out backlogs and forming new banking arrangements.
These positive developments were mentioned in a fake announcement that attempted to portray the DeFi Swap as one of Circle’s attempts to bolster its product offerings.