Crypto Alert: 2 Victims Lose Over $60M In Address Poisoning Scam

Reports say attackers are using tiny deposits and subtle address tweaks to trick people into sending funds to accounts they do not control.

Address lookalikes are the trick. Attackers send tiny “dust” transfers from addresses that mimic ones in a user’s history so that when someone copies an address they get the wrong string.

According to Scam Sniffer, that single mistake cost one user $12.2 million in January and followed a $50 million hit in December.

The tactic relies on people trusting what appears familiar; it works because most wallets show only the first and last few characters, and the middle can be swapped for a malicious match.

Someone lost $12.25M in January by copying the wrong address from their transaction history. In December, another victim lost $50M the same way.

Two victims. $62M gone.

Signature phishing also surged — $6.27M stolen across 4,741 victims (+207% vs Dec).

Signature scams lure users into approving dangerous contract calls or broad token approvals. Reports say $6.27 million was stolen from 4,741 victims in January, a 207% rise from December.

Two wallets took the lion’s share — accounting for 65% of those signature phishing losses. Attackers increasingly mix both tricks: small deposits to get attention, followed by social engineering that convinces someone to sign a transaction.

Confirmed cases leading to actual theft number about 6,633, but the confirmed loss figure already tops $83.8 million. One campaign alone created 82,030 lookalike wallets, and in September 2025 there were about 32,290 suspicious poisoning events hitting 6,516 unique victims.

The numbers show a picture of automated scripts and high-volume tactics designed to find and exploit simple human errors.

Blockchain intelligence teams have tracked flows and noticed patterns. Whitestream reports that DAI has become a favored place to park illicit proceeds because its protocol governance does not cooperate with authorities to freeze wallets.

Web3 Antivirus has cataloged a range of large poisonings, with tracked losses spanning from $4 million to $126 million in some incidents. Once funds move through these paths they are often hard to recover.

Featured image from Arek Socha/Pixabay, chart from TradingView