Safety in the crypto market is never a bad thing.

⚠️Warning: User Loses Nearly $50 Million in Sophisticated New Crypto Scam.

A serious incident has shaken the cryptocurrency market after a user lost nearly 50 million USDT by mistakenly transferring funds to a scammer’s wallet. The case is considered one of the largest on-chain frauds ever recorded.

The loss was not caused by a complex technical exploit, but by address poisoning — a scam that exploits user error. Scammers create wallet addresses with starting and ending characters similar to a victim’s trusted address, then send a small amount of funds (a dust transaction) so the fake address appears in the transaction history. When users copy an address from recent transactions without careful verification, the risk of sending funds to the wrong address becomes extremely high.

In this case, the fake address was almost identical to the victim’s commonly used wallet. On-chain data indicates a well-planned operation: prior to the $50 million transfer, the attacker deliberately “poisoned” the victim’s transaction history. Notably, the victim even made a small test transfer — a common safety practice — which unintentionally made the fake address appear more trustworthy, leading to the fatal transaction.

According to blockchain security firm SlowMist, once the funds were received, the attacker moved quickly to erase traces within about 30 minutes. The USDT was swapped into DAI, then converted into approximately 16,690 ETH, most of which was rapidly sent to Tornado Cash, a coin-mixing service designed to obscure on-chain transaction flows. This significantly reduces the chances of tracing and recovering the stolen assets.

After the incident, the victim posted an on-chain message offering the attacker 98% of the funds back within 48 hours, accepting a $1 million “reward” for the return. However, experts believe the likelihood of success is extremely low.

This incident is not an isolated case. In 2025 alone, address impersonation scams have caused an estimated $3.4 billion in losses across the crypto market.