Crypto User Loses 50M USDT in Address Poisoning Scam

A cryptocurrency user suffered a staggering loss of nearly 50 million USDT on December 20 after falling victim to an address poisoning scam, one of the largest individual on-chain thefts reported this year. The incident, detected by blockchain security firm Web3 Antivirus, unfolded when the victim mistakenly copied a fraudulent wallet address from their transaction history during a major transfer.

The scam began as the victim took a standard precaution by sending a small $50 test transaction to verify the intended recipient's address. Within minutes, an attacker deployed an automated script to generate a spoofed wallet address that closely mimicked the legitimate one, sharing the same first three characters and last four characters. This subtle similarity exploits how most wallet interfaces abbreviate long addresses, displaying only prefixes and suffixes for readability. The scammer then sent a negligible "dust" transaction from the fake address to the victim's wallet, inserting it into the recent activity log.

Unaware of the deception, the victim later copied what appeared to be the correct address from their transaction history and sent 49,999,950 USDT to the attacker's...