Fake Uniswap phishing ad on Google steals trader’s life savings

A Polymarket trader has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto because of a Uniswap phishing ad that appeared at the top of a Google search result. Hundreds of friends and associates filled up the comment section with condolences.

The founder of DefiLlama broadcasted the terrible story as a warning to the crypto community.

The founder of Uniswap – the real Uniswap – repeated that warning, “These scams are horrible, we’ve been fighting them for years.” He called the disturbing industry of fake websites that rely on ads to lure crypto investors “the ad economy” and implored that it “needs to go.”

Uniswap is a common way for crypto traders to exchange digital tokens without trusting a centralized crypto exchange with custody of their funds.

The six-figure loss is the latest example in an ongoing series where scammers buy Google Ads to direct users to fraudulent, lookalike websites that mimic real crypto interfaces like Uniswap. Victims click the ad, connect their wallet, and sign a malicious transaction. That approval grants the power to drain assets or make trades from the wallet.

For years, fraudulent Google search ads have led users to phishing pages that impersonate well-known crypto apps.

Uniswap phishing scam-as-a-service

The particular wallet drainer tool used in this attack was AngelFerno. This ‘scam-as-a-service’ wallet drainer script targets DeFi users, including prior front-end attacks that impersonated OpenEden and Curvance websites.

AngelFerno is live on multiple domains that are itemized on GitHub phishing blocklists. Users should not navigate to them.

Particularly nefarious attackers use Cyrillic characters in URLs, also known as Punycode URLs, to make the fake domain appear visually indistinguishable from the real URL.

Read more: Crypto phishing blitz hits CoinMarketCap, Cointelegraph, and Trezor

Chainalysis and other security researchers have flagged Google phishing ads as a major attack vector. In July 2025, for example, a DeFi user lost $1.2 million through a nearly identical Uniswap scam involving fraudulent Google Ads.

Forensic investigator ZachXBT called for severe consequences against Google for failing to prevent phishing ads.

Protos has reached out to the victim for confirmation about the mid-six-figure and “entire net worth” estimate of his loss but did not receive an immediate response prior to publication. The victim has said publicly that he lost six figures after being fooled by a Google ad.