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Crypto Alert: 2 Victims Lose Over $60M In Address Poisoning Scam

A easy slip of the fingers has was big losses for some crypto customers. One pockets misplaced over $12 million in January after copying the incorrect deal with, and comparable high-value errors had been seen in December.

Reports say attackers are utilizing tiny deposits and delicate deal with tweaks to trick individuals into sending funds to accounts they don’t management.

How Copying Mistakes Turn Costly

Address lookalikes are the trick. Attackers ship tiny “mud” transfers from addresses that mimic ones in a consumer’s historical past in order that when somebody copies an deal with they get the incorrect string.

According to Scam Sniffer, that single mistake value one consumer $12.2 million in January and adopted a $50 million hit in December.

The tactic depends on individuals trusting what seems acquainted; it really works as a result of most wallets present solely the primary and previous few characters, and the center could be swapped for a malicious match.

Signature Phishing Is Growing Too

Signature scams lure customers into approving harmful contract calls or broad token approvals. Reports say $6.27 million was stolen from 4,741 victims in January, a 207% rise from December.

Two wallets took the lion’s share — accounting for 65% of these signature phishing losses. Attackers more and more combine each tips: small deposits to get consideration, adopted by social engineering that convinces somebody to signal a transaction.

Scale And Automation

This just isn’t restricted to some remoted scams. Based on reports from a number of trackers, roughly 270 million poisoning makes an attempt have been recorded throughout Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, concentrating on round 17 million addresses.

Confirmed instances resulting in precise theft quantity about 6,633, however the confirmed loss determine already tops $83.8 million. One marketing campaign alone created 82,030 lookalike wallets, and in September 2025 there have been about 32,290 suspicious poisoning occasions hitting 6,516 distinctive victims.

The numbers present an image of automated scripts and high-volume ways designed to seek out and exploit easy human errors.

Why Ethereum Has Seen More Dust Activity

Analysts hyperlink a part of the latest surge to the Fusaka upgrade, which lowered the price of sending tiny transactions. Coin Metrics analyzed over 227 million stablecoin steadiness updates on Ethereum from November 2025 by way of January 2026 and located that 38% of these updates had been below a single penny.

Stablecoin-related mud now makes up an estimated 11% of Ethereum transactions and touches 26% of lively addresses on a median day. Lower charges make these spray-and-pray ways low-cost and environment friendly.

Where Stolen Funds End Up

Blockchain intelligence groups have tracked flows and seen patterns. Whitestream studies that DAI has develop into a popular place to park illicit proceeds as a result of its protocol governance doesn’t cooperate with authorities to freeze wallets.

Web3 Antivirus has cataloged a variety of enormous poisonings, with tracked losses spanning from $4 million to $126 million in some incidents. Once funds transfer by way of these paths they’re usually arduous to get well.

Featured picture from Arek Socha/Pixabay, chart from TradingView

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