Best practices: how to survive an NFT Discord wallet drainer attack

Wallet drainers are the dominant threat for anyone holding NFTs or DeFi tokens. Our database tracks 47 active drainer addresses tied to over $1.2M in losses. The good news: a few simple practices make you nearly immune, even if you fall for a phishing link.

Habit 1 — Use a burner wallet for new mints. Keep your main wallet in cold storage or a hardware wallet. For any new mint, drop, or 'free claim,' use a separate browser wallet with only enough ETH for the transaction. If it's a drainer, the loss is bounded by what's in the burner — usually under $50.

Habit 2 — Revoke approvals regularly. Every time you 'approve' a contract, you're giving it permission to move tokens out of your wallet. These approvals stay active forever unless you revoke them. Use revoke.cash monthly to clean up old approvals — it takes five minutes and has saved many wallets from delayed drainer attacks.

Habit 3 — Never share your seed phrase. Not with 'support,' not with 'wallet sync,' not with 'verification.' No legitimate service ever needs your seed phrase. If anyone asks, it's a scam. This rule has zero exceptions.

Habit 4 — Read the signature before signing. Hardware wallets like Ledger now show you what you're approving in clear text. Watch for 'setApprovalForAll' (gives away all NFTs in a collection), 'increaseAllowance' (gives away token spending), and any signature that asks for unlimited token approval. These are the drainer signatures. Walk away.

If you do get drained: revoke all outstanding approvals immediately on revoke.cash for any wallet that was connected to the malicious site. Move any remaining assets to a fresh wallet. File a report at Chainabuse and at our Report a Scam page so we can flag the address. Recovery is unfortunately almost impossible — but reporting helps the next person.