Dissecting Payload-based Transaction Phishing on Ethereum
Zhuo Chen, Yufeng Hu, Bowen He, Dong Luo, Lei Wu, Yajin Zhou · 2025
In recent years, a more advanced form of phishing has arisen on Ethereum, surpassing early-stage, simple transaction phishing.This new form, which we refer to as payload-based transaction phishing (PTXPHISH), manipulates smart contract interactions through the execution of malicious payloads to deceive users.PTXPHISH has rapidly emerged as a significant threat, leading to incidents that caused losses exceeding $70 million in 2023 reports.Despite its substantial impact, no previous studies have systematically explored PTXPHISH.In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of the PTXPHISH on Ethereum.Firstly, we conduct a long-term data collection and put considerable effort into establishing the first ground-truth PTXPHISH dataset, consisting of 5,000 phishing transactions.Based on the dataset, we dissect PTXPHISH, categorizing phishing tactics into four primary categories and eleven sub-categories.Secondly, we propose a rule-based multidimensional detection approach to identify PTXPHISH, achieving an F1-score of over 99% and processing each block in an average of 390 ms.Finally, we conduct a large-scale detection spanning 300 days and discover a total of 130,637 phishing transactions on Ethereum, resulting in losses exceeding $341.9 million.Our in-depth analysis of these phishing transactions yielded valuable and insightful findings.Scammers consume approximately 13.4 ETH daily, which accounts for 12.5% of the total Ethereum gas, to propagate address poisoning scams.Additionally, our analysis reveals patterns in the cash-out process employed by phishing scammers, and we find that the top five phishing organizations are responsible for 40.7% of all losses.Furthermore, our work has made significant contributions to mitigating real-world threats.We have reported 1,726 phishing addresses to the community, accounting for 42.7% of total community contributions during the same period.Additionally, we have sent 2,539 on-chain alert messages, assisting 1,980 victims.This research serves as a valuable reference in combating the emerging PTXPHISH and safeguarding users' assets.