Fomo Co-founder Se Yong Park: Beware of Apps and Plugins Impersonating Official Partnerships
Se Yong Park, co-founder of the crypto trading app Fomo, has issued a warning: teams are falsely claiming to have established "official partnerships" with Fomo. He stated that unless the information comes directly from Fomo's official channels, Fomo is not involved in any such partnerships. He cautioned users not to be deceived, especially by downloading any apps or browser plugins claiming to be associated with Fomo, calling this a "very common attack method."
There have been several public cases of impersonation attacks against Fomo. In August this year, security researchers disclosed a counterfeit website, fomoo.family, which added an extra letter "o" to the legitimate domain fomo.family. The design of the page is nearly identical to the official website, but it replaces the "download app" button with a "connect wallet" button. When users connect their wallets, they receive a malicious token authorization request disguised as "identity verification"; once approved, the attackers automatically transfer tokens to an address they control.
In September, an iOS app called FomoPeek was reported to distribute malicious code through the Apple App Store. The app claims to be a read-only "whale tracker"; versions 1.1 released on September 9 and 1.2 released on September 12 contained malicious frameworks that loaded upon startup, controlled by remote servers for exploitation and data collection. Investigators identified eight attack methods targeting wallet applications like MetaMask, Trust Wallet, and SafePal. Approximately 579,984 USDT have been traced to the attackers' main address. Version 1.3, released on September 17, removed the malicious components. Currently, there is no evidence that FomoPeek is associated with Fomo, but its name is considered to be an attempt to capitalize on Fomo's popularity.
Fomo has become a target for impersonation due to its rapid growth. Founded by three former dYdX employees, Paul Erlanger, Se Yong Park, and Prashan Dharmasena, Fomo is set to launch in May 2025, focusing on socialized on-chain trading and supporting Solana, Base, BNB Chain, and Monad. The embedded wallet is provided by Privy, and perpetual contract trading is integrated with Hyperliquid. As of June this year, Fomo has accumulated over 625,000 users, processed over $4 billion in trading volume, and adds approximately 3,500 new users daily; an additional 68,000 users have made their first crypto asset purchases through Apple Pay, totaling $25 million.
On the capital side, Fomo received early support from about 140 angel investors, including Solana co-founder Raj Gokal, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan; it completed a $17 million Series A round led by Benchmark in November 2025. In June this year, Fomo completed a $75 million Series B financing led by Index Ventures, with a post-investment valuation of $550 million, with follow-on investments from Union Square Ventures, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, totaling approximately $94 million in financing. The company currently has only 17 employees, and Erlanger stated that the goal is to "become the largest trading app in the world."
From a market mechanism perspective, this is a brand defense driven by security risks, not a trading event. The attackers rely on impersonating partnerships, counterfeit domains, and disguised applications to monetize Fomo's brand trust into wallet authorizations, then convert the stolen assets into stablecoins like USDT. Funds flow from gullible retail wallets believing in "official partnerships" to the attackers' addresses. The beneficiaries are on-chain security service providers and app store review systems, as well as those using embedded wallets that do not require users to connect external wallets: the legitimate Fomo guides users to download the app instead of connecting wallets, and this product design itself serves as a defense line. The pressured parties are on-chain applications that rely on external wallet connections and authorizations, as well as the App Store distribution system that allows malicious applications to pass review.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Fomo's three founders come from dYdX. dYdX was founded by Antonio Juliano in 2017 and is one of the earliest decentralized exchanges to successfully implement on-chain perpetual contracts. In 2023, it migrated from Ethereum Layer 2 to an independent application chain based on Cosmos, dYdX Chain, but subsequently lost significant market share to Hyperliquid. Fomo's approach is a correction of this experience: instead of building its own trading infrastructure, it uses Hyperliquid as the perpetual contract engine and Privy as the wallet engine, focusing solely on the front-end and social distribution for retail users. Privy was acquired by Stripe in 2025, which means Fomo's wallet layer is backed by the infrastructure of a traditional payment giant.
Impersonation and supply chain attacks are the most mature theft paths in the crypto industry. In December 2023, Ledger's Connect Kit codebase was poisoned, leading to multiple DeFi front ends being implanted with wallet theft programs, resulting in losses of approximately $600,000. In February 2025, Bybit suffered a theft of about $1.5 billion in Ethereum assets due to the developer's computer being hacked, attributed to the North Korean Lazarus group, marking the largest crypto theft in history. In December 2025, the Trust Wallet browser extension was implanted with malicious code, resulting in user losses of about $7 million. One of Lazarus's common tactics is to disguise as investors or "partners" to approach project teams and users, inducing them to download malicious programs disguised as meeting software or testing tools, which is precisely the "false partnership + app download" model that Se Yong Park warned about.
In terms of industry positioning, Fomo is in the expansion phase of "on-chain trading applications," a space already crowded with Solana trading terminals Axiom, Photon, BullX, and wallets like Phantom, while traditional brokerages like Robinhood are also offering crypto trading. Axiom reportedly surpassed $100 million in revenue within months of launching in 2025, indicating a strong monetization capability for retail on-chain trading, which means that users of such applications are high-value attack targets: they are accustomed to fast trading, frequent signing, and most hold instantly transferable on-chain assets. The hotter the brand, the higher the profit from impersonation, mirroring the history of phishing and counterfeit sites that plagued OpenSea and Blur during the NFT boom in 2021.
Structural judgment: this represents a technological replacement, specifically that embedded wallets are replacing "connecting external wallets" as the mainstream interaction paradigm for consumer-grade on-chain applications. The reason is that the traditional "connect wallet + signature authorization" model places all security judgments in the hands of users, and a single malicious authorization can empty an entire wallet, which is the attack entry point for counterfeit sites like fomoo.family. Embedded wallets encapsulate private key generation and transaction signing within the application, allowing users to simply download the legitimate app and fund it with Apple Pay, eliminating the need to authorize unfamiliar websites, thus reducing the attack surface from "countless web pages" to "one application distribution channel." However, FomoPeek's passage through the App Store review indicates that attacks will also migrate accordingly: whoever controls the distribution channel bears the security responsibility. For companies like Fomo, the "uniqueness of official channels" has become as important as the product itself.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The more valuable the brand, the more profitable the impersonation.
The most expensive vulnerabilities are not in the code, but in trust.
Reducing the number of user signatures decreases the chances of theft.
Two points for readers to note:
Source credibility: Fomo's data comes from Fortune and Tech Times, which are relatively reliable. The counterfeit site fomoo.family and the FomoPeek incident are reported by only one security blog, and Se Yong Park's original post did not specifically name which teams were involved. There is currently no confirmed connection between FomoPeek and Fomo, as stated in the text, please retain this sentence during editing.
Write based on background knowledge; this time there is no retrieval or verification of content, it is recommended to double-check: The amounts related to the Ledger Connect Kit, Bybit, and Trust Wallet plugin incidents in the AI interpretation, Privy's acquisition by Stripe, the history of dYdX, and Axiom's revenue claims.