{"id":71505,"date":"2026-02-09T10:01:37","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T10:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=71505"},"modified":"2026-02-09T10:01:37","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T10:01:37","slug":"crypto-alert-2-victims-lose-over-60m-in-address-poisoning-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=71505","title":{"rendered":"Crypto Alert: 2 Victims Lose Over $60M In Address Poisoning Scam"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A simple slip of the fingers has turned into huge losses for some crypto<\/a> users. One wallet lost over $12 million in January after copying the wrong address, and similar high-value mistakes were seen in December.<\/p>\n

Reports say attackers are using tiny deposits and subtle address tweaks to trick people into sending funds to accounts they do not control.<\/p>\n

How Copying Mistakes Turn Costly<\/h2>\n

Address lookalikes are the trick. Attackers send tiny \u201cdust\u201d transfers from addresses that mimic ones in a user\u2019s history so that when someone copies an address they get the wrong string.<\/p>\n

According to Scam Sniffer, that single mistake cost one user $12.2 million in January and followed a $50 million hit in December.<\/p>\n

The tactic relies on people trusting what appears familiar; it works because most wallets show only the first and last few characters, and the middle can be swapped for a malicious match.<\/p>\n

\n

Someone lost $12.25M in January by copying the wrong address from their transaction history. In December, another victim lost $50M the same way.<\/p>\n

Two victims. $62M gone.<\/p>\n

Signature phishing also surged \u2014 $6.27M stolen across 4,741 victims (+207% vs Dec).<\/p>\n

Top cases:
\n\u00b7 $3.02M \u2014\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/7D5ynInRrb<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Scam Sniffer | Web3 Anti-Scam (@realScamSniffer) February 8, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Signature Phishing Is Growing Too<\/h2>\n

Signature scams lure users into approving dangerous contract calls or broad token approvals. Reports say $6.27 million was stolen from 4,741 victims in January, a 207% rise from December.<\/p>\n

Two wallets took the lion\u2019s share \u2014 accounting for 65% of those signature phishing losses. Attackers increasingly mix both tricks: small deposits to get attention, followed by social engineering that convinces someone to sign a transaction.<\/p>\n

Scale And Automation<\/p>\n

This is not limited to a few isolated scams. Based on reports<\/a> from several trackers, roughly 270 million poisoning<\/a> attempts have been recorded across Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain, targeting around 17 million addresses.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Confirmed cases leading to actual theft number about 6,633, but the confirmed loss figure already tops $83.8 million. One campaign alone created 82,030 lookalike wallets, and in September 2025 there were about 32,290 suspicious poisoning events hitting 6,516 unique victims.<\/p>\n

The numbers show a picture of automated scripts and high-volume tactics designed to find and exploit simple human errors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Why Ethereum Has Seen More Dust Activity<\/p>\n

Analysts link part of the recent surge to the Fusaka upgrade<\/a>, which lowered the cost of sending tiny transactions. Coin Metrics analyzed over 227 million stablecoin balance updates on Ethereum from November 2025 through January 2026 and found that 38% of those updates were under a single penny.<\/p>\n

Stablecoin-related dust now makes up an estimated 11% of Ethereum<\/a> transactions and touches 26% of active addresses on an average day. Lower fees make these spray-and-pray tactics cheap and efficient.<\/p>\n

Where Stolen Funds End Up<\/p>\n

Blockchain intelligence teams have tracked flows and noticed patterns. Whitestream reports that DAI has become a favored place to park illicit proceeds because its protocol governance does not cooperate with authorities to freeze wallets.<\/p>\n

Web3 Antivirus has cataloged a range of large poisonings, with tracked losses spanning from $4 million to $126 million in some incidents. Once funds move through these paths they are often hard to recover.<\/p>\n

Featured image from Arek Socha\/Pixabay, chart from TradingView<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A simple slip of the fingers has turned into huge losses for some crypto users. One wallet lost over $12 million in January after copying the wrong address, and similar high-value mistakes were seen in December. Reports say attackers are using tiny deposits and subtle address tweaks to trick people into sending funds to accounts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-71505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71505\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}