Man loses $68 million in bitcoin due to ‘address poisoning’

Crypto hackers have struck again, with one victim unwittingly transferring $68 million to the wrong crypto wallet.

The man thought the crypto address belonged to someone else due to a devious action by scammers.

An analysis shows that a previously wealthy crypto investor has lost all his bitcoins. That came after cybercriminals compromised a recipient’s transaction history.

As a result, the user lost 97% of the crypto in his wallet.

Crypto trader only keeps 3% of his crypto

According to Etherscan, the affected user’s wallet now contains only 0.89 ethereum (ETH), as well as approximately $1.6 million in stablecoins.

The theft of the virtual coins included more than 1,155 wrapped bitcoin (WBTC).

Wrapped bitcoin is a cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain that represents bitcoin (BTC) on that network. This means that bitcoin can also be used within applications on Ethereum.

Cryptowallets and ‘address poisoning’

The scammers used so-called ‘address poisoning’ or ‘wallet contamination’, in which attackers purposefully send a low-value transaction to a victim’s wallet.

They do this to make their own address visible in the victim’s transaction history. By changing the first and last characters of their address to match the victim’s, they create confusion.

Commonly used wallet software often only shows the beginning and ending characters of an address, making it difficult for the user to spot small differences hidden in the middle of the address.

The attacker hopes that the next time the victim needs to receive a transaction, he will accidentally copy the spoofed address from his transaction history.

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