Information accurate as of 30th July 2021
After publishing my first post on staying safe in Axie Infinity, a number of new security tips and concerns have appeared on my radar which I felt is also important to share.
First of all, the official Axie Infinity Twitter put up a cute little infographic on how to keep your account safe:
I wanted to expound further on the bottom left most picture due to some conversations I recently had.
Tip 1:
Make sure that you are downloading the official extension of the project that you are looking for! The safest way to do so would be to look for it directly under extensions and ensure that it is the right developer/ website that is providing it.
Many Axie Infinity players recently have fallen victim to a phishing scam involving their Ronin wallet, which caused them to lose all their assets in Ronin when the scammer decides to strike. Basically what happened was that a google ad for 'ronin wallet' was created that led to a lookalike site where you could either sign up or import your ronin wallet seed/secret recovery phrase. With this information, the scammer could then basically just wait until the account was filled with either Axies or slp and just transfer it out, which led to many asking what happened or searching for help.
IF YOU HAVE ALSO SIGNED UP TO YOUR RONIN WALLET THROUGH CLICKING A LINK THAT YOU FOUND THROUGH A GOOGLE AD, PLEASE CREATE A NEW RONIN WALLET IMMEDIATELY (meaning get a new secret recovery phrase, do not restore your old compromised account) AND TRANSFER OUT ALL YOUR ASSETS!
Tip 2:
Follow the official Axie Infinity social media accounts and announcements to be up to date on new releases. For example, 6 days ago on the 24th of July 2021, Axie Infinity tweeted that there is NO Ronin Mobile Wallet at the moment. However not everyone follows these official sources and so may also fall prey to these fake wallets if they just type it into the play store search bar, and so I wanted to further cover what to look for when downloading apps as well:
This is the fake app. Do NOT download!
As a good practice,, there are two three things that you should ALWAYS look at before downloading an app: who is the creator of the app, what are the ratings and what are the review on the app.
In this case, the creator is someone called Junior Cesar. If you look at the Ronin wallet extensions being offered on the Google and Mozilla extension web stores, it becomes clear that this is fake:
The offered by section clearly shows the official Axie Infinity website in the Google Web store
The creator in the Mozilla Add-ons page show Sky Mavis, which are the developers of Axie Infinity.
Its always good to also go one step further just to make sure, so if you go onto the official Sky Mavis website to look at their team, you will see that there is NO such person, which proves that the app is a fake one (this is also a phishing scam, as they are trying to get your seed phrase, if you have used this app, IMMEDIATELY delete it and also create a new wallet and get a new secret recovery phrase.
Second thing is to look at the rating. Its super low as compared to the official extensions. Unfortunately I sometimes have to use apps with super low ratings as well, so then I will always check the reviews. In this case some very fantastic members of the community have rightly pointed out that this is a scam and you should not use it (thank you guys!)
So, how do you create a new Ronin Wallet?
It is much easier to do that on PC, and utilizes the same process as described for Metamask here. If you are a mobile user utilizing Kiwi browser, I'd advise you to try to find a trusted friend that you can send your assets to first or try to find a PC to do the process.
Even if you don't have any assets yet, please still immediately create a new Ronin Wallet and abandon the one that may have been compromised. This will also save you unneeded heartache down the road if you forget to do so now.
Please do let your friends who play Axie Infinity know about the above scams so that they can be aware of them and know what to do to keep their assets safe. Stay safe, and see you all in Lunacia!