Long-dormant Ethereum wallet dodges poisoning scam on $4.6M transfer

An Ethereum wallet that received its first ether in the network's July 2015 genesis block made its first-ever outgoing transfer, and scammers pounced within minutes. After a 0.05 ETH test payment at 22:04 UTC, bots monitoring the chain for dormant whale wallets triggered a barrage of dust transfers from two lookalike addresses designed to trick the owner into copying a fraudulent recipient from the wallet's history — a tactic known as address poisoning.

The owner avoided the trap and, 38 minutes after the test, sent 2,154.94 ETH (~$4.6 million) to the correct address, which now holds about 2,155 ETH. Etherscan tags the scammers' funded accounts as "Fake_Phishing." Address poisoning has become a volume business on Ethereum — Citi warned in January that the spam was inflating the network's record transaction counts.