Copy Error Causes Investor to Lose 50 Million USD: A Costly Lesson on "Address Poisoning" in Crypto

The cryptocurrency market has just recorded a shocking incident, demonstrating that even a tiny mistake in copying a wallet address can lead to catastrophic consequences. An investor lost approximately 50 million USD USDT simply by accidentally sending money to a fake wallet address created by hackers. Scam Script: Sophisticated and Extremely Dangerous According to the information recorded on the blockchain, the victim ( with a wallet address starting with 0xcB80) took a step that many people in the market still do: transferring 50 USDT as a test before sending a large amount. This is considered a safety measure to ensure that the receiving address is correct. However, after this test transaction, the attacker quickly deployed a technique called “address poisoning” ( poisoning the address ). The hacker created a fake wallet address that has the first 4 characters and the last 4 characters identical to the victim's real address, and then executed a small transaction so that this fake address would appear in the transaction history. “…” In the Wallet Interface - Indirect Causes of Disaster The key point is that many wallet applications today shorten wallet addresses, only displaying the beginning and the end, while the middle part is hidden by “…”. Due to the habit of only checking a few characters at the beginning and end, the victim inadvertently copied a fake address from the transaction history instead of their real wallet address. As a result, in the next transaction, the remaining 49,999,950 USDT was sent directly to the scammer's wallet and cannot be recovered. A Very Expensive Lesson for the Entire Market Blockchain security experts believe this is one of the painful yet highly cautionary examples for the crypto community. The incident shows: Transaction history is no longer a safe source to copy addresses. Current attacks do not require hacking wallets; they only exploit users' careless habits. Blockchain transactions are irreversible; one mistake can lead to permanent loss. The Principles of Survival When Transferring Crypto From this incident, investors need to especially remember: Always check the entire wallet address, not just the first 4 and last characters. Do not copy addresses from transaction history, especially for large amounts. Use Address Book / Whitelist if the wallet or exchange supports it. Split large transactions, do not transfer the entire amount in one go. For amounts in the millions USD, multi-layer verification, even offline checks. Conclusion In crypto, security is not just technology but also a habit. This loss of 50 million USD did not come from a system error, but from a moment of subjectivity. The market always pays a very high price for carelessness, and sometimes, that price is an entire fortune. In the blockchain world: There is no room for mistakes, and there is no “undo” button.