The investor made a transfer to a “poisoned address”. He lost approximately $70 million

CertiK, a company that deals with blockchain security, has detected a transfer of bitcoin (specifically Wrapped Bitcoin – WBTC) worth approximately $69.3 million to an account “linked to address poisoning.” The fraudster made a fake transfer of the Ethereum cryptocurrency (ETH) and persuaded his victim – the investor – to send the cryptocurrency.

Hackers robbed an investor. What is “address poisoning”?

In turn, Peckshield noticed that the cyber fraudster exchanged the stolen bitcoins for 23,000. ETH. He then transferred the funds. On May 3, Ethereum cost approximately PLN 3,000. dollars, and the bitcoin rate was around 63,000. dollars.

Cyvers, a website that reports similar frauds, indicates that this was an incident in which the loss of funds is one of the highest in history.

“Address poisoning,” also known as address spoofing, is a form of spoofing. It involves fraudsters trying to convince their victims to make transactions to a fake wallet address. Addresses can be up to 42 characters long. By creating a false address, cyber fraudsters “impersonate” the real one, leaving some of the first and last characters in the hope that the victim will not notice the discrepancies in the remaining characters, will copy this false address from the transaction history and make the transfer there.

Cybercriminals are stealing cryptocurrencies on a large scale

Hackers stole almost $2 billion in cryptocurrencies in 2023. This is clearly less than the record amount of USD 3.8 billion stolen in 2022, De.FI reported in a report cited by the website.

One of the largest victims of cybercriminals was Mixin from Hong Kong, which lost $200 million in a data breach in September 2023. In March 2023, approximately USD 197 million was stolen from the Euler Finance platform. In turn, in 2022, hackers broke into the Ronin network and stole cryptocurrencies worth over $600 million.