The sufferer first despatched a $50 check to the right deal with earlier than the attacker’s look-alike deal with captured the total switch.
Scammer transformed stolen USDT to DAI inside minutes, blocking any potential Tether freeze motion.
Funds are being laundered by way of Twister Money, a mixing service that obscures transaction trails.
Comparable $70M deal with poisoning case in Might 2024 resulted in 90% restoration after sufferer negotiated on-chain with attacker.
Dec. 20 (Crypto-Information.internet) – A crypto dealer misplaced almost $50 million in USDT after falling sufferer to an deal with poisoning assault on Dec. 19, with the stolen funds already transformed to an unfreezable stablecoin and routed by means of mixing protocols.
The attacker drained 49,999,950 USDT from a pockets that had been energetic for 2 years and funded by means of Binance, based on safety agency Web3 Antivirus. The sufferer had despatched a $50 check transaction to the meant recipient deal with earlier than transferring the total quantity to a fraudulent look-alike deal with that the scammer had planted within the pockets’s transaction historical past.
Deal with poisoning works by sending small quantities of cryptocurrency from addresses designed to imitate professional ones. On-chain data present the scammer’s deal with shared the identical first 4 and final 4 characters because the sufferer’s meant vacation spot. The sufferer copied the spoofed deal with from their transaction historical past as a substitute of the right one.
Speedy Conversion Blocks Restoration
Inside minutes of receiving the stolen funds, the attacker swapped the USDT for 49,533,438 DAI utilizing a decentralized trade. In contrast to USDT, which Tether can freeze on-chain, DAI is a decentralized stablecoin with no central issuer able to blocking transfers.
Tether has frozen over $2.7 billion in USDT thus far in cooperation with legislation enforcement, however the fast conversion left no window for intervention.
Funds Traced to Twister Money
The stolen funds at the moment are being laundered by means of Twister Money, a mixing protocol that obscures transaction trails, based on blockchain analytics agency Arkham Intelligence.
The incident represents only one class of escalating threats going through crypto holders in 2025. Whereas deal with poisoning exploits digital transaction histories, bodily “wrench assaults” involving kidnapping and extortion have additionally doubled this 12 months, demonstrating that criminals are concentrating on crypto wealth by means of each technical and violent means.
Restoration Stays Unlikely
The theft mirrors a Might 2024 incident the place a sufferer misplaced $70 million in wrapped Bitcoin to handle poisoning. In that case, the sufferer efficiently negotiated with the attacker utilizing blockchain messaging, providing a ten% bounty and recovering roughly 90% of the funds.
Nonetheless, with the present sufferer’s funds already transformed to DAI and partially combined by means of Twister Money, blockchain analysts contemplate restoration unlikely. The sufferer has not made any public assertion.
Sources
Web3 Antivirus X Submit – Unique discovery, assault sequence particulars, sufferer pockets profile URL: https://x.com/web3_antivirus/standing/2002043421368693140
Etherscan Transaction File – Precise stolen quantity (49,999,950 USDT), scammer deal with, fund conversion particulars, timestamp (Dec-19-2025 04:01:23 PM UTC) URL: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x40c3071839bcfba2623fe9e419bcaaf667b6570489d04d194f106282202de077
Arkham Intelligence Visualizer – Fund move monitoring, laundering pathway evaluation URL: https://intel.arkm.com/visualizer/entity/0x7A1bEe3d53BF70861eF6C0652c63B206ea8fdE76
Protos Article – Assault methodology particulars, sufferer pockets provenance (2-year historical past, Binance funding), $70M prior case comparability URL: https://protos.com/crypto-trader-loses-50m-usdt-to-address-poisoning-scam/
