Blind signing means approving something your wallet cannot turn into readable words, so the only description of what you agreed to is the one the website gave you. On a real claim page that is an annoyance. On a fake one it is the whole attack. The button says Claim, the signature says this contract may move your tokens, and if your screen shows hex you have no way of knowing which of the two you approved.

You meet it at almost every claim, and it decides whether a drainer needs anything more from you. It doesn't. The drainer kits catalogued in DeepStrike's compilation of Scam Sniffer data need no password and no seed phrase. They need one signature.

One signature, spent later

Drainers lean on four request types: approve, setApprovalForAll for NFTs, Permit and Permit2. The first is an ordinary on-chain transaction that costs gas. The last two are different. Under EIP-2612 and Uniswap's Permit2, you sign an off-chain message. You pay no gas, and nothing appears on chain until the attacker submits it, at a time of their choosing. A Permit prompt looks like logging in or proving eligibility, and that is why it works. Decripto, citing SlowMist's 2026 analysis, reports that 38% of phishing incidents over $1 million involved Permit-style signatures.

The scope is the second problem. As CryptoNexa puts it, "Approvals can be unlimited in scope and indefinite in duration. One signature can authorise a contract to move every unit of a token you will ever hold." Kerberus describes delayed drains, where an approval signed during a harmless-looking claim sits unused for weeks or months before anyone acts on it.

None of this would matter if the screen told you what you were signing. Ledger's own explainer admits hardware wallets historically could not render complex contract data. Software wallets have a different weakness: they are always online, so the interface can be tampered with to hide what is being signed.

The fix in progress is Clear Signing. The Ethereum Foundation launched it around May 13, 2026, combining ERC-7730 (a descriptor format) with ERC-8176 (attestations to those descriptors), with a public registry at clearsigning.org. Unchained's report names the catch. Drainer contracts generally do not publish descriptors, so the standard works best for legitimate protocols. That cuts in your favor. On a device that clear-signs, a claim that suddenly falls back to raw data is telling you something.

Three cases worth recognizing

The fake FBI Token, March 2026. On March 19, 2026, the FBI's New York field office warned about counterfeit TRC-20 tokens sent unsolicited to Tron wallets. The token's message claimed the wallet was under AML investigation and pointed holders to fbiamlform.org. Per Tronscan, 728 wallets held the token, which had been created only eight days before the warning. The IC3 notice describes the claim site as triggering a malicious signature request once a victim connected to check eligibility or claim. The Block's reporting adds that the site also harvested personal data.

A $1.76 million Permit, March 2026. Ledger Academy records one holder losing $1.76 million in USDC after signing a malicious permit message. No gas was paid and no transaction was sent. It was just a signature.

The Sky impersonation. MalwareTips traced fake voting reward pages for Sky (the real site is sky.money) on throwaway domains such as skyeco-vote.com. On these pages the Connect Wallet button never checked eligibility. It opened the drainer's signature request.

The strongest argument that this is fading comes from the same Scam Sniffer data. Drainer losses fell 83% in 2025 to $83.85 million, and affected wallets fell to 106,106. That is a real decline. But losses fell faster than victim counts, and the implied average loss dropped to about $790 per wallet. The kits did not go away. They went cheaper and wider, which is a loss sized for a farming wallet rather than a whale.

Not the same as a stolen seed phrase

Often confused with The difference
Seed phrase theft A drainer never sees your key. It holds a signed permission, and that permission is enough to move your tokens.
A gas-paid approve transaction A Permit or Permit2 signature costs nothing and leaves no on-chain trace until the attacker uses it.
Connecting a wallet Connecting shares your address. On a fake page it is the step that sets up the signature request, and the harm comes from the signature that follows.

What the device screen shows

Ledger's Clear Signing is built on ERC-7730. A 2025 Generic Parser upgrade extended it to more applications without a custom plugin for each dApp. Our sources do not give the menu steps for turning it on, or for the Transaction Check feature, so this page won't guess at them. Use Ledger's own documentation for those. If your Ledger signs through a browser wallet, the pairing a Ledger with MetaMask walkthrough covers that setup.

For Trezor, CTO Tomáš Sušánka said the company planned to ship transaction decoding in early Q2 2026 and full human-readable signing later that quarter. Whether your firmware has it is something to confirm in Trezor's release notes. None of our sources document what a Keystone 3 Pro displays for a contract call over QR, so we can't tell you. For how devices compare at the signing screen, see our wider hardware wallet coverage.

The rule to sign by

If a claim asks you to blind sign, the answer is no. Kerberus is plain that a legitimate airdrop never needs a seed phrase, an upfront gas payment or broad wallet permissions. So a Permit, a Permit2, a setApprovalForAll or an unlimited approval on a Claim button is the warning itself, whatever the page says it means.

Eligibility should never need a signature at all. If you want the answer without that risk, a read-only lookup is a different act from signing. The safest version is a pasted public address in a scanner.

Do the claims themselves from a burner wallet funded with gas money only. Then revoke its approvals at revoke.cash, typed into the address bar yourself. WhySoGeek flags fake revoke sites in 2026 that drain the wallet they claim to clean up. Keep the holdings you can't afford to lose on a hardware wallet you rarely connect. If something does go wrong, the FBI says to type www.ic3.gov directly into the browser. IC3 has no social media presence and never charges to recover funds.