A Costly Slip-Up: How $50 Million USDT Vanished in Seconds

Address poisoning strikes again—and this time the damage is massive. A crypto investor just learned an expensive lesson after copying what appeared to be a legitimate wallet address, only to discover it was a carefully crafted fake. The scammer had engineered the lookalike address with matching beginning and ending characters, betting on the user's careless copy-paste habit.

Result? $50 million USDT gone instantly.

This isn't a fluke. Address poisoning has become a preferred attack vector for sophisticated fraud operations. The tactic preys on human nature—most people only glance at the first few and last few characters of an address before hitting send. Hackers exploit this blind spot by creating addresses that mirror the genuine ones just enough to slip through.

The victim's only mistake was a moment of inattention. No smart contract exploit, no private key breach, no exchange hack. Just a simple copy-paste that cost $50 million.

It's a harsh reminder: in crypto, attention to detail isn't optional—it's survival.