Trader Loses $68 Million in Address Poisoning Scam

An unidentified user has fallen victim to an “address poisoning” scam, resulting in the loss of 1155 wrapped bitcoins valued at approximately $68 million, as reported by Cyvers Alerts.

?ALERT?Are we mistaken, or has someone truly lost $68M worth of $WBTC? Our system has detected another address falling victim to address poisoning, losing 1155 $WBTC. ?

Victim: https://t.co/5NKlOFnepJ

Address poisoner: https://t.co/R6fF0QipBH

Poison transaction:… pic.twitter.com/UpG34ZcZvY

— ? Cyvers Alerts ? (@CyversAlerts) May 3, 2024

The potential fraud was detected by a research team’s AI system. According to CoinStats, the trader lost over 97% of their assets.

In “address poisoning,” perpetrators deceive users into sending cryptocurrency to an incorrect address, which may resemble the legitimate one with similar starting and ending characters.

The MetaMask team was the first to warn about this type of scam. Such attacks cannot be prevented, so users should carefully copy addresses from their transaction history.

In a similar incident in August 2023, an unknown individual stole $55,000 in USDT from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The agency was transferring seized funds, which caught the criminal’s attention.

The perpetrator noticed the initial test transaction and quickly created an address similar to the receiving one. The scammer then sent a small amount of tokens to the DEA wallet to appear in the list of recent transactions.

It seems a careless DEA employee transferred the next batch of funds to the scammer.

As reported by CertiK, in April 2024, the cryptocurrency market suffered the lowest monthly losses from various cybercrimes since the company began monitoring in 2021, amounting to approximately $25.7 million.