Crypto traders, this is a brutal wake-up call for anyone handling large transfers on-chain.
Just yesterday (December 19, 2025), a major whale withdrew 50 million USDT from Binance and fell victim to a sophisticated address poisoning attack—one of the largest single-victim losses we've seen in recent months.
How the Scam Went Down:
The trader sent a small test transaction (~$50 USDT) to their intended recipient address to double-check.
Scammers, monitoring the wallet closely, immediately created a fake address that looked almost identical (matching the first and last few characters):
Real: 0xbaf4...F8b5
Poisoned: 0xBaFF...f8b5
The scammer sent tiny "dust" transactions from the fake address to make it appear in the victim's transaction history.
When the trader copied the address from their recent history for the big transfer, they accidentally pasted the poisoned one and sent the full $50M $USDT straight to the scammer.
The funds were quickly swapped to DAI (to avoid freezes by Tether), then laundered through mixers like Tornado Cash. Irreversible and gone forever.
Key Lessons for All Traders:
Never copy-paste addresses from transaction history — always type or paste from a verified source (like your address book).
Manually verify the full address character-by-character before confirming any large tx.
Use hardware wallets or tools with built-in address verification.
Test with tiny amounts — but even that isn't foolproof if scammers are watching.
This isn't the first time (remember the $70M incident earlier?), but $50M hits hard. Stay safe out there—double-check everything!
What do you think? Have you ever had a close call with address mistakes? Drop your thoughts below 👇
#Crypto #USDT #Binance #AddressPoisoning #CryptoScam #CryptoSecurity