Ethereum Wallet Dormant for 11 Years Moves $4.6M, Successfully Avoiding Address Poisoning Scam

Nov 10: According to CoinDesk, an address that received ETH from the Ethereum genesis block in 2015 made its first outgoing transfer on Nov 10 after 11 years of dormancy. The address first sent a 0.05 ETH (about $106) test transaction to a new address, then 38 minutes later moved 2,154.94 ETH (about $4.6 million) to the correct target address.

Less than three minutes after the test transaction was sent, two addresses highly similar to the target address at the beginning and end began sending tiny amounts of ETH to the old wallet — a classic address poisoning attack. Scammers forge similar-looking addresses and send dust transactions in an attempt to get users to mistakenly copy the scam address from their transaction history. However, the wallet owner did not fall for it, and the funds were ultimately transferred to the correct address.

The report said address poisoning has become a large-scale business on Ethereum. In January this year, Citi warned that such dust transactions were driving up network transaction volumes, with the majority of these transfers amounting to less than $1.