Address poisoning
Address spoofing
Address poisoning is a scam in which an attacker plants a lookalike address in a victim's transaction history, hoping the victim later copies it by mistake and sends funds to the attacker.
The lookalike matches the first and last characters of an address the victim has paid before. A tiny, fake-token or zero-value transfer puts it into the victim’s history.
A 2025 study by Tsuchiya, Dong, Soska and Christin of Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain counted 270 million attack attempts against 17 million victims over two years, with at least $83.8 million lost in 6,633 incidents.
The defence is to copy addresses from a saved contact or the recipient, not from history, and to compare every character. See how address poisoning works.
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