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Earlier today, an extremely unlucky trader fell victim to an address poisoning scam, losing a whopping $68 million worth of wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC). Most of these funds have been already converted to Ethereum, according to crypto tracking and compliance platform MistTrack.
A $68 million mistake
The address poisoning scam involves creating a fake address that is very similar to the real one.
For this fraudulent scheme to work, a potential victim has to be careless enough to copy and paste the wrong address for performing their transaction. Hence, users are supposed to always double-check their addresses (especially if they are copy-pasted from one's transaction history). At the same time, suspicious transactions should be simply ignored.
Yet, the trader in question did not follow these pieces of advice, losing an entire fortune due to a few fateful clicks.
In this case, the fake address had the same six characters at the beginning and the end.
All eyes on the stolen funds
According to blockchain investigator Officer's Notes, there is no function in the code of the wBTC issuer to freeze these funds, which means that they are likely lost forever.
However, now that these funds have been converted to Ethereum, it is not clear how anyone is going to launder these funds considering that their moves will be scrutinized by countless blockchain sleuths. "This is huge amount and you're most likely gonna get caught. You pretty much got everyone watching every move you make right now," MistTrack said.
MistTrack has suggested that the scammer should consider returning the funds since it is very unlikely that they will be able to spend all of them without getting caught.