Ethereum Trader Loses $12.4 Million to Fake Wallet Address

An unidentified crypto trader has fallen victim to a sophisticated scam, losing approximately $12.4 million worth of Ethereum in the process. According to analytics platform Lookonchain, the trader transferred a total of 4,556 ETH to a fake wallet address on Friday ^[1].

The victim had previously been regularly sending large amounts of Ethereum to a deposit address belonging to Galaxy Digital. Criminals exploited this behavioral pattern by creating a fraudulent address whose first and last characters closely resembled those of the legitimate Galaxy Digital address ^[1].

Over an extended period, the scammers initially sent small amounts to the victim's wallet in order to appear in the transaction history. When the trader later made a transfer, he apparently copied the destination address directly from his history without manually verifying it again. The entire sum was then transferred to the fraudulent address in a single transaction ^[1].

The incident underscores the necessity of carefully checking wallet addresses before every transaction, even when they originate from one's own transaction history.