An Ethereum consumer misplaced $600,000 on Tuesday morning to a typical crypto rip-off generally known as ‘address poisoning.’
Highlighting the loss, SpecterAnalyst, a self-described “onchain investigator,” warned customers to “always verify the entire wallet address.”
The pricey mishap comes only one week after one other consumer misplaced over $350,000 to the identical rip-off, regardless of first sending a take a look at transaction to the attacker’s tackle.
NEW DAY: A sufferer misplaced ~$600K to an tackle poisoning assault.
The sufferer initially despatched $12 to the proper vacation spot tackle (0x77f6ca8E…).
Shortly after, the pockets was spammed with txs from a look-alike tackle mimicking the unique. About half-hour later, the sufferer… pic.twitter.com/WB0WFhOYfL
— Specter (@SpecterAnalyst) February 17, 2026
Deal with poisoning is an assault vector wherein scammers ship spam transactions to real customers, after they make a switch.
The incoming transactions come from similar-looking addresses within the hopes that the consumer will confuse them for the meant tackle in future transfers. Pretend variations of frequent token tickers could also be transferred in these spam transactions, or small quantities of real property.
The technique requires producing a brand new, look-alike tackle with an identical starting and finish characters, which the consumer unintentionally copies and pastes into future transfers.
In style block explorers typically abbreviate the center portion of addresses to save lots of house.
Barabazs.eth, of the Ethereum Basis and Ump.eth, proposes a partial answer to this subject. The instrument permits for visually truncated addresses, whereas the complete textual content stays searchable for customers to double-check earlier than transfers.
Nevertheless, utilizing an tackle guide is much safer than copying addresses from a block explorer.
After Ethereum’s Fusaka improve lowered transaction prices, tackle poisoning has surged. The quantity of freshly created addresses has risen sharply following the protocol improve in December final yr, in accordance with analysis from Andrey Sergeenkov.
Take a look at failed efficiently
Within the wake of in the present day’s loss, SpecterAnalyst additionally drew consideration to a major loss from final week.
This time, the consumer even despatched a take a look at transaction to the scammer’s spoofed tackle, however “the test fund was not properly confirmed before sending the main amount.”
The straightforward error led to a lack of over $350,000.
SpecterAnalyst means that, for this consumer, testing grew to become “a routine step rather than serving its actual purpose of confirming the correct destination address.”
