U.S. DEA accidentally sent 55,000 USDT to a scammer

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) lost $55,000 in stablecoin USDT due to an “address poisoning.” The report comes from Forbes.

In May, after a three-year investigation, the agency seized more than $500,000 in ‘stablecoins’ from two Binance accounts suspected of laundering proceeds from the sale of illegal substances.

According to the search warrant reviewed by journalists, the funds were placed into DEA-controlled crypto wallets on Trezor. As part of the seizure procedure, the DEA sent a test amount of 45.36 USDT to the U.S. Marshals Service address.

Subsequently the attacker noticed the transaction and quickly created a wallet with the same first five and last four characters of the receiving account.

After that, the scammer sent a small amount of tokens to the DEA address to appear in the list of recent transactions. Apparently, an inattentive agency employee, in the next transfer, sent the funds to a counterfeit wallet.

Later, when the Marshals noticed the mistake, they asked Tether to freeze the assets. However the attacker had already converted them into Bitcoin and Ethereum, and then moved them to another wallet.

The DEA turned to the FBI for help, but has yet to identify the offender. All that has been found are two Binance accounts that paid gas fees for the scam wallet. The accounts were registered using Gmail addresses.

Analysts at Dune have described the U.S. government as “one of the largest Bitcoin whales.” They estimate the authorities’ total stake in the first cryptocurrency at 205,515 BTC (~$5.8 billion).

In March 2023, the United States sold 9,861 BTC for $215 million, seized from the Silk Road darknet marketplace. In July, another 9,824 BTC (~$300 million at the time).