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Abstract

Cryptocurrency users have increasingly become targets of phishing and scam attacks. To mitigate these threats, leading crypto wallets (e.g., MetaMask) have introduced transaction simulation , which previews a transactions balance changes before on-chain execution. While effective against traditional fund-draining attacks, we show that this defense can itself be exploited by a new phishing technique, which we term transaction simulation phishing . This attack uses carefully-crafted smart contracts whose execution depends on dynamic blockchain state, causing simulations to display benign or profitable outcomes while the actual on-chain execution redirects users funds to attacker-controlled addresses.