Crypto Trader Bleeds $50 Million in Elaborate Address Poisoning Heist

Another whale gets harpooned. The crypto seas remain treacherous as a sophisticated address poisoning scam nets a staggering $50 million haul from a single trader.

The Phantom Wallet Ploy

Forget brute force—this attack weaponizes distraction. Scammers generate a wallet address visually identical to the target's, differing by just a few invisible characters. They then send a tiny, 'dusting' transaction from this fake address to the victim's history. The goal? Create phantom deja vu.

The Costly Copy-Paste

Later, when the victim goes to send a legitimate $50 million transaction, they glance at their transaction history. Seeing what looks like a familiar address—the poisoned one—they copy and paste it. The funds sail seamlessly to the scammer's wallet, a perfect replica with zero legitimate ties. No smart contract exploits, no protocol bugs—just human error exploited at scale.

The New Frontier of Social Engineering

This isn't a hack of code, but a hack of habit. It bypasses hardware wallets and 2FA, targeting the mental shortcut of verifying only the first and last few characters of a long crypto address. Security audits can't catch it; only relentless vigilance can.

The incident serves as a brutal reminder: in a world built on 'trustless' systems, the weakest link often wears a watch—preferably a Rolex, funded by someone else's misplaced trust. The blockchain giveth transparency, and the blockchain very publicly taketh away.

A crypto trader has lost nearly $50 million in USDT after inadvertently transferring funds to a wallet controlled by scammers in a sophisticated address poisoning attack. According to on-chain analytics firm Lookonchain, the trader withdrew close to $50 million in USDT from Binance on December 20.

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