Trader Loses $68M of Wrapped Bitcoin in Address Poisoning Scam

[TomPluz]

This is an interesting story and it involved a staggering amount of $68M of Bitcoin from the victim and the culprit was using the so-called crypto address poisoning. So what is address poisoning?

According to Cryptonews:

Address poisoning, also known as address spoofing, exploits a trader’s haste and negligence during transactions. It involves tricking victims into sending their digital assets to fraudulent addresses belonging to scammers.

In most probability, the victim was not aware that his gadget can be compromised resulting into this unbelievably high-value  scam which raises the question that even people who are already experienced with cryptocurrency - its ins and outs - can still be victimized by a more creative evil one.

There is no question that scams, hacks and similar cancerous endeavors within the cryptocurrency industry are one of the many blackeyes and which can make some people stay away from participating in this emerging industry. According to CertiK, over $502 million worth of digital assets were stolen across 223 hacks and exploits during the first quarter of 2024. Now, that is staggering!

Do you think that we should now accept the occurrence of these scams and hacks as very normal in the cryptocurrency industry...and what are the things we can do to protect ourselves from them?

[LogitechMouse]

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Do you think that we should now accept the occurrence of these scams and hacks as very normal in the cryptocurrency industry...and what are the things we can do to protect ourselves from them?

A big yes. There's nothing much that we can do about those irresponsible investors out there. We can feed them information, advice, and guides to secure their funds, but if they're irresponsible, it's pretty much useless.

Yearly, billions and billions of dollars are being scammed and hacked by these hackers and scammers in various ways. Right now, these people are continuously evolving, using different and more attractive ways to lure those newbie investors. Even those old ones that are irresponsible are the ones that will fall into these types of scams. Just imagine half a billion dollars have been stolen in just 1 quarter, and by the end of this year, for sure it will reach a billion dollars.

Like I said, providing information to them would be our best way to help them, but that doesn't mean that they will be 100% proof from these scammers. There's nothing we can do about it, but to accept that there will investors that be either scammed or hacked on a yearly basis. Sometimes, letting them experience for at least one time is helpful because from there, they will learn how to adjust and how to be more secure with their funds.

[Lucius]

Such cases only prove that people who have a lot of money are not necessarily intelligent - because losing money in such a trivial way would be really shameful for me personally. Without going into the details of the case, if I had tens of millions of dollars worth of coins and if I were to do such an extremely valuable transaction, I would check everything at least ten times - not to mention that the use of a hardware wallet would be mandatory.

The hardware wallet allows us to check whether the address in the interface is identical to the one that came from our device, which means that something like this can never happen to us. I would say that people learn best from their own mistakes, even though this one would be extremely expensive - although there is a suspicion that the story was made up so that the owner could avoid paying taxes - and it is not the first time that people have pretended that they were hacked, and in fact they just transferred coins to another address that is still in their possession.

[Faisal2202]

Do you think that we should now accept the occurrence of these scams and hacks as very normal in the cryptocurrency industry...and what are the things we can do to protect ourselves from them?

OMG that's a big number, I mean how a person can lose it all in one trade, was he making the tx in one go, if yes then he should have made more then one tx, and maybe after 1 or 2 he would notice the ignorance he is doing. Address poisoning is a very common scam, and most of people become a target of it when their clipboard gets hacked, or when the victims copy addresses from the last tx they received (using explorer maybe).

This really gives me goosebumps to imagine what would be the situation of that person who lost that much money, $68 million is not a joke, and an overall lose of $502 million is also insane. We should really not accept the occurrences of these scams, although they are common, and many newbies become a prey to it, but seeing experts people losing it all idk why hurts the most. We should raise more awareness, and help people to realize that there is no place for ignorance in this market, they should suspect things even if the things looks idiotic to ask about.