On Friday morning, crypto investigators pointed out to an unfortunate user, who lost $92,401 in USDC stablecoin after becoming a victim of “address poisoning”, where scamsters had allegedly cloned the wallet address of the victim to dupe them. The scam was report by Scam Sniffer, an on-chain investigator on X, who then alerted other users regarding the possibility of address poisoning.
According to the on-chain data, the victim copied a poisoned address “0xBDB0CAc8302CD42bBf5bF25A60F1Fe80FB5C3F59” from the transaction history, which looks exactly like his address, “0xBDB018edf9f171775f57616bC1f6eE7d81843F59”, without knowing the fact that its transaction has been contaminated by a scammer.
Two days ago, a similar incident took place, where a user lost $57,000 after falling for a poisoned address.
What is Contaminated Transaction History & Address Poisoning?
In simple terms, Address poisoning is a scam where fraudsters send random tokens to addresses that closely resemble ones you have used before. The aim is to trick you into sending tokens to the wrong address if you’re not paying close attention. In this case, the user directly copied the wrong address from transaction history without verifying it, resulting in a loss of $92,401.
For example, 46 hours ago, the scammer sent 0.011836 USDC from their poisoned address to users, causing the victim to mistakenly think it was their own address.
To avoid this kind of mishap, users must try typing their wallet address manually instead of copying and pasting. They should also cross-check their transaction history for any suspicious addresses and consider using a crypto wallet with whitelisting or bookmark features.
Also Read: Lazarus Group’s NFT Game Scam Targets Crypto Investors
