A crypto investor has been hit hard by a scam known as “address poisoning”.

This latest incident serves as a strong warning about being extremely careful when dealing with crypto transactions.

Here’s how the scam works:

A user created a new address and sent a test transaction of 0.05 ETH to this new address. A scammer generated an address with the same starting and ending letters/numbers and transferred 0 ETH to the user. This transfer will now appear in the users transaction history.

Most wallets hide the middle part of an address with “…” to make the UI look better. When the user went to transfer the full amount to their new address, they accidentally copied the address generated by the scammer.

These two addresses would have looked identical as they have the same starting and ending letters/numbers.

The user ended up transferring 1,155 Wrapped Bitcoin to the scammer.

That’s $73.5 million at todays prices… Ouch.

Always double (and triple) check that you have the right wallet address.

Remember, there’s no help centre for crypto.

Once a transaction is confirmed, it’s final. There’s no going back unfortunately.