🚨 $1.6M Lost in Just One Week: Crypto Users Fall Victim to Address Poisoning Scams 💸
📅 Timeline of Major Losses:
📍 Friday, August 15, 2025 – A victim lost 140 ETH (~$636,500) after unknowingly copying a scammer’s lookalike address from a poisoned transaction history.
📍 Sunday, August 10, 2025 – Another user lost $880,000 in USDT to a similar attack.
📍 Other reported cases this week included losses of $80,000 and $62,000.
🕵️ Modus Operandi — How the Scam Works?:
💰 Scammers send tiny transactions from wallet addresses visually similar to legitimate ones.
📜 These fake addresses appear in the victim’s transaction history.
✂️ Victims copy-paste the wrong address when making transfers.
🚫 Funds go straight to the scammer, with no recovery possible.
⚡ No hacking needed — The scam works purely because of publicly visible blockchain data and human error in copy-pasting addresses from history.
💡 Extra Danger: Some victims also signed malicious phishing signatures such as approve, increaseAllowance, and permit, giving scammers direct access to their tokens.
🧠increaseAllowance is a blockchain function (common in ERC-20 tokens) that lets you raise the spending limit you’ve previously given to another address or smart contract.
🔴 In scams — If you unknowingly sign an increaseAllowance request from a malicious contract, you could give it permission to drain more of your tokens than you intended.
💸 This week alone, $600,000 was stolen through these signature tricks.
⚠️ On Tuesday, August 12, 2025, one case saw $165,000 in BLOCK and DOLO tokens vanish instantly.
🔒 Security Tips to Stay Safe:
✅ Use an address book or whitelist in your wallet.
🔍 Double-check the FULL address before sending.
🛑 Be cautious with any signature request you don’t understand.