Backpack Says Scammers Are Using Its Real Token Addresses to Sell Fake Stock Airdrops

Backpack, the crypto exchange, has warned that scammers are running fake airdrop campaigns around its tokenized stock products, The Defiant reported. The company said the fraudulent campaigns cite genuine token addresses in order to look legitimate, and directed users to its official mint directory on Solana to check what is real.

Why a real address makes a fake campaign worse

An airdrop is a free distribution of tokens to existing holders or users. The standard defence against a fake one is to check the contract address against the issuer's published list, on the reasoning that a fraudster must use a different address because they do not control the real one.

That defence fails when the fraud is not in the token but in the claim page. A campaign can display Backpack's authentic mint address, link it to a block explorer where it resolves correctly, and still route the user to a site that asks for a wallet signature. The signature is the payload. The address is set dressing, and it is the piece a cautious user is most likely to verify and then relax about.

Tokenized stocks are a good disguise

The products being imitated are tokens that track listed shares. These are plausible airdrop subjects in a way that most assets are not, because the category is genuinely new, venues genuinely have been distributing them, and a user who has never held one has no instinct for what a legitimate distribution looks like. Someone who would ignore a free memecoin will stop for a token with a familiar ticker behind it.

The arrival of this particular fraud is itself a signal that the tokenized equity market has reached enough retail awareness to be worth impersonating. Scam waves follow attention, not fundamentals, and they tend to arrive shortly after a category starts appearing in general coverage.

The only check that holds

Backpack's remedy is the right one and also the dull one: go to the issuer's own published directory, from a link you navigated to yourself, and compare. A directory maintained by the exchange is the single authoritative list of which mints are its products. Nothing presented inside a campaign page, including an address that checks out, is evidence of anything.

This desk does not publish claim links or contract addresses from campaigns, and the reason is the one Backpack has just described. A correct address in an article is also a correct address in a phishing page, and reproducing it only makes the verification habit less useful.

What to expect next

Fake airdrops cluster around real ones. If venues listing tokenized shares run genuine distributions in the coming weeks, the imitation campaigns will intensify around those announcements and will borrow their timing. The thing to watch is whether other venues issue similar warnings, which would indicate the operation is running across the category rather than against one brand.