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Monad Users Warned of Fake Transfers Amid Network Rollout
Monad – Scammers wasted little time targeting the newly launched Monad blockchain, rolling out spoofed token transfers less than two days after the network and its MON token went live on Monday. The activity emerged just as airdropped and publicly sold tokens became accessible to users during Monad’s first wave of liquidity and onboarding.
Fake Transfers Masquerading as Legit Activity
Monad CTO and co-founder James Hunsaker was the first to flag the issue, warning that the suspicious transactions appeared as normal token transfers on blockchain explorers—despite the fact that the wallets being mimicked never signed anything and moved no funds.
“Warning—there are fake ERC-20 transfers pretending to be from my wallet,” Hunsaker posted on X, explaining that ERC-20 is merely an interface standard. Malicious actors can easily deploy contracts that fulfill the required functions while inserting falsified address entries, enabling them to emit events that resemble legitimate transfers.
Hunsaker emphasized that the activity is not a flaw in Monad’s blockchain itself, but rather a smart contract–level spoof designed to deceive new users.
Vanity Addresses and Zero-Value Transfers
According to Shān Zhang, CISO at blockchain security firm Slowmist, scammers exploit the chaos of early network adoption. As new users create wallets, bridge funds, and load token contracts, attackers generate vanity addresses imitating the first and last four characters of real user addresses. They then send spoofed transactions to poison wallet histories, hoping users later copy these addresses accidentally.
Most of these attempts rely on Zero-Value Transfers, which the ERC-20 standard permits. Zhang noted that if a transaction appears to come from a user but they never signed it, it is “almost certainly a spoof.”
Artificial Activity Around MON
Hunsaker shared examples showing attackers emitting fake swap calls and fabricated signatures to simulate trading around the MON ecosystem, creating the illusion of activity as the network gains traction.
MON’s launch has drawn significant attention: around 76,000 wallets claimed tokens over the past month, and MON surged after going live, contributing to a market cap of roughly $500 million.
