A shockingly clever new mini-advance-fee scam to steal crypto that doesn't even require interacting with the victim has appeared

This is Atomic Shrimp's video talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TijuiMegg5o

I have seen a couple comments on YouTube that were attempting this scam, but especially knowing how greedy people are it really does seem like a good portion of crypto people would definitely fall for this because it preys on type of people who, if they saw a wallet stuffed with cash on the ground, would take all the money in it without a second thought.

In short, the scam is really quite clever and quite simple: the scammer loads a large amount of a valuable ERC-20 token (e.g. USDT or USDC) in some token onto a crypto wallet and then publicly shares the seed phrase in some naive-looking comment like this:

Hey, I'm having trouble moving some of my crypto from my SafePal hardware wallet to Binance, can someone else help me? My seed phrase is [...]

An unscrupulous victim loads that seed phrase into their wallet and notices a large amount of some token, like 10,000 USDT in the wallet. However, the wallet is devoid of ETH/TRX/POLY/SOL/whatever other coin is needed to pay the network fee to withdraw the token. So the victim, intending to steal the tokens for themselves, send the required amount for the network fee into the wallet. However, to their dismay, the wallet is a 2-of-2 multisig and they can't actually send the tokens. The scammer, of course, controls both signers and uses this to withdraw the network fee that was sent by the victim.

While this scam could theoretically work on any network, Atomic Shrimp showed it happening on TRON, which actually makes the most sense when you think about it a bit more: on Polygon and Solana, the network fees are so low that the victims would only need to send a minimal amount to have enough to send the tokens away, so the scammers would only be able to steal some 0.01 POLY from each victim. On ETH, the opposite problem is presented: network fees are so high that stealing the victim's network fee payment would consume most of it in real network fees to transfer the booty out. But TRON's weird resource system makes it uniquely profitable.

For those unaware, TRON has two resources: energy and bandwidth. All transactions consume bandwidth and it is the physical transaction size in bytes. Each TRON address is allocated 600 units of bandwidth for free which regenerates over a 24-hour period. Energy, meanwhile, represents computational power which is consumed by smart contracts (equivalent concept to gas on ETH-like chains). Energy is not free and must be paid for by burning TRX or by staking it. Transferring TRX is not considered a smart contract call and thus it only requires bandwidth, which is free. Calling a smart contract (like the transfer function of a TRC-20 token) will consume bandwidth and energy, and it is quite expensive since TRON punishes frequently-used contracts by making their callers pay extra penalty energy units. At the time of writing, a transfer of USDT burns 13.5 TRX (at a cost of ~0.30 USD per TRX).

Thus, the victim would have to transfer in around 20 TRX with which to pay the energy cost to be safe, which is around 6 USD. This can then be yoinked by the scammers at no cost since transferring TRX costs only bandwidth which is free.