A lot of people recently are asking why they have been airdropped a random token that they have never heard of before so I thought I'd try to shine some light on this phenomenon.
I'd just like to begin by saying that in the event that this does happen, the best thing to do is leave the tokens in your wallet. Don't trade them or attempt to send them anywhere just forget about them, it does not jeopardise the security of your wallet in almost all cases.
So there are 4 main reasons why this may have occurred:
- A person/group is attempting a dusting attack. (Relatively unlikely)
- A token is trying to boost its number of holders in order to make it look more appealing to new investors. (Highly likely)
- Almost free advertising. (Highly likely)
- A mistake. (Extremely unlikely)
1. A person/ group is attempting a dusting attack.
A dusting attack is an attack in which a trace amount of crypto, called dust, is sent to thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of wallet addresses. This attack is deployed in order to track these addresses with the hope of “un-masking” or de-anonymizing them. Dust is found most commonly in Binance and Ethereum smart contracts, but it can essentially happen on any blockchain. Attackers use dusting attacks in order to try to identify those with large cryptocurrency holdings.
The attackers then follow the movement of the funds originated from the dust transaction and combine the affected addresses into one such "identity". Then, using additional information from other sources, the attackers can try some educated guessing to figure out the real identities behind those addresses. Still, this does not give an attacker access to the funds held by an address. It only allows them to maybe know who the owners of the addresses are.
The absolute best thing to do when you receive unwanted dust in your wallet is to leave it be and forget about it. The attackers want you to send the tokens elsewhere or try to trade it in order to gain extra information on you, the wallet holder. By doing absolutely nothing with the tokens you are giving the attacker no extra information which will halt the attack.
2. A token is trying to boost its number of holders in order to make it look more appealing to new investors.
This is especially common for Binance and Ethereum smart contracts and is used as a way to deceive new and prospective investors. The team behind this token will airdrop their token to thousands of random addresses in order to boost holder numbers, and make it appear like the token is actually much larger than it is. They will then probably go on to boast about how many X thousands of people are "hodling strong" and use it as an incentive for prospective investors.
This is completely harmless towards your crypto and your wallet and again, the best thing to do is just leave the dust and forget about it.
3. Almost free advertising.
Dusting is also used as an extremely cheap form of advertising. They will often airdrop thousands of addresses an amount of their token equivalent to $0.00001. They do this so that people will check their wallets, see this new mysterious token, and then go and check it out. They also do it so that people will post in forums and groups saying "did anyone else get X token airdropped", which again, is almost free advertising.
Again, this is completely harmless and the best thing to do is just leave it and forget about it.
4. A mistake.
This is so unlikely that I thought I might not even bother to mention it but I might as well. There is always the slim chance that someone sent their tokens/coins to a wrong address and that wrong address just happened to be yours. If it is a large sum of money it is highly unlikely that it is any of the previously mentioned things in this post, and you will have to decide for yourself what you want to do with your new found wealth.
If it is a tiny amount of $ it is almost definitely one of the things I have mentioned above, so again, leave it and forget about it, it will not cause you any harm.
So that's it I suppose. Just thought I'd try to shed some light on the situation because of the increase in posts/comments on the topic.
Here are some extra resources about dusting attacks as I only gave a very brief summary:
https://support.exodus.com/article/1231-what-is-a-dust-attack-and-how-to-mitigate-it
https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/crypto-dusting-attack-bitcoin
https://academy.shrimpy.io/post/what-is-a-dusting-attack-crypto-exploit-explained
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