How can you protect your tokens while relaxing and visiting relatives and friends?

Author: imToken

With the Lunar New Year approaching, it's time to bid farewell to the old year and welcome the new, and also a time for reflection:

In the past year, have you fallen into the trap of a Rug Pull project that has run away with your money? Have you been "buying in and getting stuck" because of the hype from KOLs promoting trading? Or have you suffered losses due to increasingly rampant phishing attacks caused by accidentally clicking on links or signing contracts?

Objectively speaking, the Lunar New Year does not create risks, but it can amplify them—When the frequency of fund flows increases, when attention is diverted by holiday plans, and when the pace of trading accelerates, any small mistake is more likely to be magnified into a loss.

Therefore, if you are planning to adjust your positions and reorganize your funds before the holiday, you might as well give your wallet a "pre-holiday security check-up." This article will also start from several real and high-frequency risk scenarios and systematically sort out the specific operations that ordinary users can take.

I. Beware of "AI Face-Swapping" and Voice Simulation Scams

The recently viral SeeDance 2.0 has once again reminded everyone of the fact that in an era of accelerated AGI penetration, "seeing is believing" and "hearing is believing" are becoming ineffective.

It can be said that since 2025, AI-based video and voice fraud technologies have become significantly more mature, including voice cloning, video face-swapping, real-time facial expression imitation, and tone simulation, all of which have entered a low-barrier, scalable "industrialization stage."

In fact, based on AI, it is now even possible to accurately recreate a person's voice, speech rate, pause habits, and even micro-expressions, which means that this risk is particularly easily amplified during the Spring Festival.

For example, imagine you're on your way home or during a break from a family gathering when a message pops up on your phone. It's a voice or video call from a "friend" in your contacts via Telegram or WeChat, sounding urgent, saying their account is restricted, they need to manage their red envelopes (digital cash gifts), or they need to temporarily advance a small amount of tokens, requesting an immediate transfer. The voice message sounds perfectly natural, and the video even shows a "real person." With your attention diverted by holiday plans, how would you judge their identity? In previous years, video verification was almost the most reliable method, but today, even if the other person is speaking to you with their camera on, it's no longer 100% trustworthy. In this context, simply relying on a glance at a video or a voice message is insufficient for verification. A more reliable approach is to establish a verification mechanism with your core circle (family, partners, long-term collaborators) that is independent of online communication. This could involve offline codes known only to each other, or detailed questions that cannot be deduced from publicly available information. Furthermore, we must re-examine a common path risk: links forwarded by acquaintances. After all, as is customary, during the Spring Festival, "on-chain red envelopes" and "airdrop benefits" can easily become viral entry points for spreading within the Web3 community. Many people aren't deceived by strangers, but rather by trusting acquaintances who forward links, thus clicking on carefully disguised authorization pages. Therefore, everyone needs to remember a simple yet extremely important principle: **Do not click on any links from unknown sources directly through social media platforms, and never authorize them, even if they come from "acquaintances."** Ideally, all on-chain operations should be performed through official channels, bookmarked URLs, or trusted portals, rather than in chat windows. II. A "Year-End Cleanup" of Your Wallet If the first type of risk comes from trust being forged by technology, then the second type of risk comes from our own long-term accumulated hidden risk exposure. As we all know, authorization is the most fundamental and easily overlooked mechanism in the DeFi world. When you operate within a DApp, you are essentially granting the contract control over a token. This could be a one-time grant, an unlimited amount, a short-term effect, or even remain in effect long after you've forgotten about it. Ultimately, it may not be an immediately effective risk, but it is a persistent exposure. Many users mistakenly believe that as long as their assets aren't stored within the contract, there are no security issues. However, during bull markets, people frequently try various new protocols, participating in airdrops, staking, mining, and on-chain interactions, accumulating authorization records. When the hype dies down, many protocols are no longer used, but the permissions remain. Over time, these excess historical authorizations are like a pile of neglected keys; if a vulnerability occurs in a protocol you've long forgotten about, it can easily lead to losses. The Spring Festival is a natural time for review and reorganization. Taking advantage of the relatively stable period before the holiday to systematically check your authorization records is a worthwhile action: Specifically, you can revoke authorizations that are no longer in use, especially unlimited authorizations; use limited authorizations for large amounts of assets held daily, rather than permanently granting full balance access; and separate long-term stored assets from daily operational assets, creating a layered structure of hot and cold wallets. In the past, many users needed external tools (such as revoke.cash) to complete these checks. Now, mainstream Web3 wallets like imToken have built-in authorization detection and revocation capabilities, allowing users to view and manage historical authorizations directly within the wallet. Ultimately, wallet security is not about never granting authorizations, but about the principle of least privilege—granting only the necessary permissions at the moment and revoking them promptly when no longer needed.

III. Travel, Social Interactions, and Daily Operations: Don't Be Neglected

If the first two types of risks stem from technological upgrades and the accumulation of permissions, then the third type of risk comes from environmental changes.

Traveling during the Spring Festival (returning to hometowns, traveling, visiting relatives and friends) often means frequent device switching, complex network environments, and intensive social interactions. In such an environment, the vulnerabilities of private key management and daily operations are significantly amplified.

Mnemonic phrase management is the most typical example. Saving screenshots of mnemonic phrases to phone albums, cloud storage, or forwarding them to oneself via instant messaging tools is often done for convenience, but in mobile scenarios, this convenience itself constitutes the biggest hidden danger.

Therefore, remember that mnemonic phrases must be physically isolated and stored without any network connection. The bottom line for private key security is being disconnected from the network.

Social scenarios also require boundary awareness. Displaying large asset pages or discussing specific holdings during holiday gatherings is often unintentional, but it may sow the seeds of future risks.

Even more alarming are actions that use the guise of "exchanging experiences" or "teaching guidance" to guide users to download fake wallet applications or plugins. All wallet downloads and updates should be completed through official channels, not through social chat windows. Furthermore, always verify three things before transferring funds: the network, the address, and the amount. There have been too many cases of whales losing large sums of assets due to misoperation caused by attacks using addresses with similar first and last digits. Moreover, similar phishing attacks have become industrialized in the past six months: Hackers often generate a massive number of on-chain addresses with different first and last digits as a seed database. Once a fund transfer occurs between an address and an external entity, they immediately find addresses with the same first and last digits in the seed database, then invoke a contract to perform a related transfer, casting a wide net and waiting for the harvest. Because some users sometimes directly copy the target address from the transaction record and only check the first and last few digits, they fall victim to these attacks. According to Yu Xian, founder of SlowMist, phishing attacks targeting first and last digits are "a game of casting a wide net, hoping those who are willing will take the bait; it's a game of probability."

Due to extremely low gas costs, attackers can mass-poison hundreds or even thousands of addresses, waiting for a few users to make mistakes while copying and pasting. A single successful attack yields benefits far exceeding the cost.