Thank you so much for sharing this kind of scam! It really helps everyone in keeping abreast the attitude whenever we come across suspicious links and scams in this day and age.

Given that scammers have been developing and innovating their methods just to scam people, it is definitely helpful if everyone would share all the possible scam methods that they use so that we can exercise extreme caution whenever we encounter these activities.

The fact that they are now targeting our address makes it scarier for us to transact and make public our address to anyone we transact.

Basically, this type of scam has been around for a long time. Scammers send small amounts of tokens to many wallets to increase their chances of success, because they know that there will definitely be people who don't pay attention and send tokens to the scammers addresses. Basically, this takes advantage of other people's negligence, because the addresses are almost identical to ours.

Personally, i have experienced this multiple times. i received transactions from addresses that were nearly identical to those in my Phantom wallet. Fortunately, i always double-check the address before sending. Typically, victims of this scam copy the address from their last transaction.

Real important lessons in the article shared. Thank you very much. This is part of the cybersecurity education that I advocate for everyone who is involved in cryptocurrency. Don't think you are untouchable. Review your already existing security and protection and also make changes where you need to. In as much as there are increasing scams, there is also a growing body of knowledge on these new scams and how to continue to remain safe even when are far away and not have to worry for the safety of your bitcoin assets.

Thieves always take advantage of the slightest loophole and the fact is that even though some of these things happen, they always get their prey.

If you look at this pattern, they deliberately look for addresses that look the same in order to trick victims by copying addresses from their histories.
Honestly, even though I may never do something like this, but by looking at the total loss obtained, it is clear that quite a lot of people are trying to send their assets by copying addresses that already exist in their history. It makes things much simpler that to avoid this, apart from being more observant, we just have to be careful about everything. Because in the end this kind of fraud will never happen if we are not careless and I think this is also a consideration for those people who always send assets by copying addresses from their historical records so that things like this are considered and more noticed so that things don't happen that are not wanted.

For people who don't double check properly, perpetrators could probably make do with similar looking addresses in which the first few and/or the last few characters are the same or close.


It could be out of laziness. I vaguely remember reading an article about someone copying an address off a block explorer.

For instance, rather than going to a wallet/exchange to copy the address directly, they could look for it from a known address—maybe they have this bookmarked or something— which has transacted from it before.

The lesson is to always copy the address directly from source e.g. wallet/exchange. Plus double check every character to be extra sure. I've been doing this for years, and have stayed safe.

When you see the amount to have been chatted away using this scheme, numbering about $83 million in cryptocurrency, then one would begin to realize just how serious it is. The uniqueness of our none custodian wallets as it concerns private keys and seed phrase doesn’t really rest with the public keys. These are often subject to some similarities and scammers have learnt how to exploit these using address poisoning and dust attacks. You just have to be armed with enough information to stay at the top of the game. When ever you are unsure, just generate a new address and be safe.

"Fool me once, shame on you...Fool me twice, shame on me"

Very relevant in the bitcoin and crypto sphere

This attack will never get you if you practice basic security and have common sense. These attacks are common and you can find them in many chains, they are very automated and often the poisoning transaction arrives seconds after you have used your wallet. Simply checking the address at three points, beginning, end and the middle, solves this issue. Further, never copy the address from the transaction history from your wallet or a blockchain explorer. It is that simple.

Nobody is forced to act faster, they are just using the things wrong.

Scams such as this wouldn't work if people started taking their cryptocurrency transactions seriously instead of just being quick with it. You should never hurry to make a financial transaction when you know that the transaction is irreversible and there is no way you can recover the money once it is gone, in case you send it to the wrong address. That's why, it's essential for people to make sure that they are using the correct address by always checking and confirming the address multiple times until they are totally satisfied that their funds are going into the right destination.

Newbies, and sometimes even veterans, often make the mistake of not giving this much importance out of confidence that they can't make mistakes, but we should know that even if we don't make mistakes ourselves, there are things that can make us do stuff that we didn't plan to do. Apart from this, one can also become a victim of a clipboard malware that can change the address you have copied to a different but similar address, and you won't even notice if you don't double-check.

The moral of the story is, that we should always be careful when making financial transactions, and then such scams won't be effective.

This is another reason why they say to never re-use a bitcoin address.

Laziness or carelessness can lead to very costly mistakes.