Some crypto lessons are learned for an exorbitantly high price – to be specific, sometimes as high as $50 million. Such was the fate of a crypto wallet holder, who lost a huge sum of money due to a simple wallet copy-paste mistake.
Crypto wallet owner loses $50 million
In a bizarre development, the owner of a crypto wallet lost as much as $50 million by falling victim to an ‘address poisoning’ attack. The mishap serves as a reminder about always being extra vigilant when doing any crypto transaction.
According to an X post by web3 analyst Specter, a wallet holder with their address starting with ‘0xcB80’ had sent 50 USDT as a test to their own address. Once the stablecoin was received successfully, they decided to send the rest of the amount.
In the meantime, a scammer closely following wallet movements of the so-called crypto sharks and whales was tracking the aforementioned user’s wallet activities. Seeing a small 50 USDT transfer from a wallet holding 50 million USDT piqued the scammer’s interest.
They immediately spoofed a wallet address that had the same initial and last four characters. Once created, the scammer quickly sent the victim a small amount of 0.005 USDT from the newly created wallet address.
Unknowingly, the sender simply copied and pasted the false destination wallet address – 0xBaFF2…6b08f8b5 – from their recent transaction history, unaware of how closely they were being monitored by the crypto fraudster.
The victim then sent the remaining 50 million USDT directly to the scammer’s address, parting ways with their funds in the most brutal way possible. The following screenshot shows the false address (red arrows) and the correct address (green arrow).
Specter remarked that the scammer is already depositing the funds into Tornado Cash. Hackers usually send stolen crypto to Tornado Cash to anonymize and launder the funds, making them difficult to trace on the blockchain.
Always triple-check your wallet address
While crypto traders and investors may have struggled this year due to the market’s forgettable performance, crypto scammers definitely made a significant amount of money this year.
Recently, another victim lost $440,000 as they fell prey to an Ethereum wallet phishing scam. Seeing people lose their hard-earned crypto holdings in a matter of seconds is not a pleasing sight. That’s exactly why there can be no room for carelessness when doing a crypto transaction.
