It’s a familiar moment. You’re interacting with a dApp, things seem smooth, and suddenly MetaMask pops up with a signature prompt filled with hex blobs. You click “Sign” because that’s what you’ve always done, right?
Except this time, you’ve just authorised a scammer to drain your assets.
Welcome to the world of wallet spoofing, a scam that doesn’t break the wallet itself but hijacks the very way users interact with it. It doesn’t rely on complex reentrancy attacks or custom opcodes. Instead, it exploits rushed UX, uninformed consent, and the deeply flawed trust model around signatures in Web3.
We like to believe that Web3 users are empowered. That with great responsibility, self-custody, signatures, and on-chain interactions comes great control. But in practice, we’ve handed users incredibly sharp tools with barely any guardrails. Wallet spoofing attacks are the consequence of this contradiction.
If you’ve ever signed a message in MetaMask, Rabby, or any Web3 wallet without fully understanding what you were signing, you’re not alone. And if an attacker had spoofed the frontend or crafted a malicious signature payload at that moment, your assets would’ve been fair game.
This is not theoretical. This is happening every day.
What Is Wallet Spoofing, Really?
Spoofing, in its simplest form, is deception. In the context of wallets, it refers to tricking users into signing messages or transactions they didn’t intend to authorise. This isn’t a smart contract bug or protocol-level exploit. It’s social engineering and UI manipulation baked into the design of dApps and the blind spots of wallet providers.
Scammers often create interfaces that mimic legitimate apps or inject malicious prompts into real dApps via compromised frontends or malicious browser extensions. The wallet prompt that follows looks like any other. But the signature payload? It’s anything but.
One common trick is using eth_sign with carefully crafted data. A user might believe they’re logging into a service or verifying their identity. In reality, they’re signing a message that grants broad, sometimes unlimited, permissions to a malicious contract. These permissions might later be used to execute token approvals, drain NFTs, or initiate asset swaps through relayed meta-transactions.
Where UX Fails Us
The deeper issue here isn’t just the scam, it’s the experience that enables it. Wallet prompts often present opaque hex strings, raw calldata, or encoded EIP-712 structures without any meaningful explanation. To an average user, these are incomprehensible. To a sophisticated user, they’re merely annoying. In both cases, users are conditioned to click “Sign” just to get on with their task.
In traditional finance, you’re not allowed to authorise a wire transfer based on a cryptic message. But in Web3, you can sign away everything you own with a click, and no contextual warning will ever appear.
This cognitive shortcut is what attackers exploit.
Even wallets that support human-readable messages via EIP-712 can fall short when dApps intentionally obfuscate message content, or worse, when users get accustomed to ignoring details in long signatures. We’ve created a culture of frictionless interaction, which ironically leaves users more vulnerable to signature-based scams.
When MetaMask or another wallet displays a signature prompt, especially one using eth_sign or even EIP-712, the user is shown a blob of hex-encoded data. Sometimes it’s structured and semi-readable. More often than not, it’s a dense, alien string of characters that no average person can interpret. A malicious message could easily say “Authorise login to ExampleDAO,” while granting full access to a relayer contract that can move tokens, swap assets, or interact with vaults. Users don’t read the fine print. In most cases, they don’t even understand that there is fine print.
Real Incidents in the Wild
In 2022, phishing sites mimicking NFT marketplaces like OpenSea used eth_sign to bait users into signing malicious messages. The payloads were cleverly crafted to appear as login challenges but were actually orders authorising the transfer of valuable NFTs.
By early 2023, similar tactics had evolved into more sophisticated spoofing via blind signing. One high-profile case involved a fake airdrop site for a well-known token. Users were asked to “claim rewards” and were presented with a signature request that looked like a standard claim. What they signed was a meta-transaction payload that gave the attacker full approval to spend tokens in the background. The transfers were executed minutes later via a relayer contract, and the damage was irreversible.
Why Blind Signing Is So Dangerous
The core vulnerability isn’t a bug in Solidity or an unchecked external call. At the heart of this issue lies a foundational gap in Web3’s signature UX. The current model assumes the user understands what they’re signing. But that assumption is broken. In practice, there’s almost zero verification at the user level. Wallets rarely contextualize what a signature does, and even fewer provide meaningful warnings or enforce action limits.
Blind signing is still common across the ecosystem. Some wallets don’t even parse structured data unless explicitly asked to. Others display minimal warnings or offer no inspection tools. Once signed, there’s often no record of the original intent, only a raw string stored in off-chain logs.
And it’s not just eth_sign. Even well-intentioned EIP-712 messages can backfire. If the message schema is too verbose, users will skip reading. If it’s too abstract, it won’t make sense. And if the UI doesn’t translate it into something human, it defeats the purpose entirely.
When scammers understand this better than wallet providers do, the playing field is rigged from the start.
Better UX Is the Only Way Out
To fix this, we need to rethink how users interact with signatures. This means moving away from blind signing and embracing better UI affordances for risk.
Wallets should:
- Offer contextual labels and warnings based on known malicious patterns.
- Parse EIP-712 messages into human-readable summaries with clarity on what will happen if signed.
- Detect known approval functions and explicitly highlight token permission changes.
- Limit or sandbox high-risk actions behind additional user validation, like 2FA or time-locked approvals.
- Flag unknown domains or contract interactions with crowd-sourced reputation layers.
Beyond that, we also need better standardisation of how dApps request signatures. Developers should be held to stricter norms, and libraries should guide them toward more transparent user flows. Too many dApps use eth_sign when a structured EIP-712 would have sufficed, or worse, when no signature was needed at all.
A Cultural Shift Is Due
Security isn’t just about better tooling; it’s about user behavior. We need to untrain the habit of “sign and forget” and rebuild trust through clarity. This is not a call for more friction, but for intentionality. Clicking “Sign” should carry weight, not just muscle memory. As on-chain complexity grows and dApps become more powerful, signatures are going to carry even more weight. L2s, account abstraction, gasless transactions, meta-signatures, and delegated permissions all rely on the user making sound decisions at the point of signing. That makes signature UX not just a convenience issue, but a foundational security layer.
Wallet spoofing is a symptom of a deeper design flaw: Web3 asks users to take irreversible action without giving them the tools to understand the consequences. And until we fix that, no audit, no bug bounty, and no insurance policy will be enough.
If we truly believe in user empowerment, we need to design like it.
