Etherscan launches a surveillance feature named ETHProtect to help users track funds originating from illicit sources.
Ethereum’s block explorer Etherscan has announced a new scam monitoring feature to track illegal activities. The new feature named Every Transaction Hash Protect (ETHProtect) will blacklist suspicious wallets by allowing users to check if incoming funds actually originate from phishing schemes or scams or not.
JustOut: We are happy to announce the release of ETHPROTECT (https://t.co/7aTPYZSRfw). Integrated directly into Etherscan it lets you know in advance if an address is potentially 'Tainted' so that you can better protect yourself and avoid unexpected surprises. pic.twitter.com/pZ8eCJpekR
— “The Etherscan” (@etherscan) April 14, 2020
With this new feature, users will be able to track the source of the contamination of funds. As soon as they come across a tainted wallet, a red banner will pop up alerting them that the funds are linked with illegal activities.
Moreover, these wallet addresses will be pinned red, allowing users to get to know about the transaction history. And it will also display the transaction has which originally contaminated the funds, along with the actual source of origin and the number of nodes it passed since being tainted.
Etherscan published a blog post explaining the matter. It notes, “With an increasing number of scams, hacks and fraudulent activities, we aim to identify potentially tainted addresses and to make available this information to all our end users. While taint tracing itself is not new and commonly used by large commercial organizations such as crypto exchanges and providers, services like these can costs thousands of $$ dollars upwards per month and is normally not within the reach of the common end-user or open-source project.”
According to the announcement, while users will be able to trace illicit funds in real-time, the end-goal of the project is to eliminate contaminated funds out of circulation.
Etherscan was launched way back in 2015, and since then it has become one of the most popular integrated Ethereum block explorers.
