The Huge $2.6 Million Copy-Paste Nightmare: A Stark Warning For All Crypto Wallet Users

• An Ethereum wallet holder lost nearly $2.6 million USDT on May 26 by mistakenly sending funds to a fake address.
• ScamSniffer flagged the two large USDT transfers, noting suspicious zero-value probing transactions likely involved.
• The sender was reportedly victimized before in a similar fashion, having previously lost $840K in an address manipulation scam.

An Ethereum wallet holder just lost nearly $2.6 million in two Tether (USDT) transactions today, May 26, after reportedly copying a fake wallet address by mistake. On-chain activity tracked by ScamSniffer, a blockchain security monitoring tool, shows both large transfers were flagged within a short window, raising immediate concerns over possible exploit-linked behavior or unauthorized asset movement. 

This unfortunate event serves as another stark reminder of the critical importance of diligence in crypto transactions.

The sender’s wallet, which begins with the identifier “0x86C0300F,” made two high-value USDT transfers to the same suspicious recipient wallet address, “0x4668EE74.” The first transfer, for about 843,166.83 USDT, went through approximately four hours before a second, even larger transaction of around 1,754,893.45 USDT followed. Together, these two mistaken transactions add up to a staggering 2,598,060.29 USDT lost.

ScamSniffer Flags Suspicious Transfers, Possible Address Spoofing

ScamSniffer flagged the activity primarily due to the repetition of such large transfers moving between the same two addresses in a short timeframe. This is a behavior often seen in address spoofing incidents, where scammers create fake addresses that closely mimic legitimate ones, or in cases of mistaken fund redirection due to copy-paste errors from tainted transaction histories.

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Adding another layer of concern, the sender is reportedly the same individual who previously lost $840,000 in a separate spam-related address manipulation incident. This history makes the current loss even more tragic and highlights the persistent nature of these attack vectors.

Suspicious Zero-Value Transactions Preceded Large USDT Loss

According to the publicly available transaction records, a total of twelve separate USDT movements were logged between the sender’s and the recipient’s wallet. Most of these prior movements involved zero-value transactions. 

Scammers often use these zero-value transfers to “poison” a user’s transaction history with look-alike addresses, hoping the user will accidentally copy the fake address for a future, larger. transaction. The appearance of such probing transfers in this wallet’s history adds further weight to suspicions of ongoing malicious activity targeting the victim

The second large, loss-making transaction was reported to have occurred just 11 minutes before ScamSniffer identified and flagged the suspicious activity. The earlier, smaller (but still substantial) transfer was made about four hours before that. ScamSniffer noted that the wallet’s interaction history likely played a crucial role in this costly error, with the victim potentially copying the fake address from their prior transfer logs, a common pitfall for users not meticulously verifying recipient addresses.

No Legitimate Service Linked To Recipient Wallet, Investigations Ongoing

As of this report, investigations into the transaction sources are ongoing. Crucially, no smart contract interactions or known service provider engagements have been linked to the recipient wallet that received the nearly $2.6 million in USDT. 

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The absence of any external transaction metadata strongly increases the likelihood that these USDT transfers were not part of any legitimate service or payment but were instead directly sent to an address controlled by a scammer or an attacker exploiting a user error.