Ethereum Users Lose Over $62M to Address Poisoning Attacks: Report

Highlights:

• Ethereum users lost $62 million in two months as address poisoning scams increased.
• Lower transaction fees made dust attacks cheap and helped fake wallet addresses spread.
• Signature phishing rose in January and drained millions through simple token approval scams.

In recent months, Ethereum users have been losing large amounts of Ether due to address poisoning scams and signature phishing scams. According to Scam Sniffer, users lost $62 million in just two months due to these scams. Thus, these scams are becoming easier to perform and are causing greater damage to users. For instance, in January, a user lost $12.2 million due to copying the wrong address from their transaction history. Earlier, in December, another such scam led to a $50 million loss for users.

Advertisement

Someone lost $12.25M in January by copying the wrong address from their transaction history. In December, another victim lost $50M the same way.

Two victims. $62M gone.

Signature phishing also surged — $6.27M stolen across 4,741 victims (+207% vs Dec).

Top cases:
· $3.02M —… pic.twitter.com/7D5ynInRrb

— Scam Sniffer | Web3 Anti-Scam (@realScamSniffer) February 8, 2026

Low Fees Fuel Address Poisoning Across the Ethereum Network

Address poisoning exploits how people use their wallets. Attackers create addresses that closely resemble real ones and send tiny dust transactions. As a result, these fake addresses appear in transaction histories. Later, users may copy them by mistake.

At the same time, the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade in late 2025 cut transaction fees. This change made it cheap to send millions of dust transactions every day. What was once expensive became easy. Because of this, the scams spread faster. Blockchain researchers say many of these transfers are spam, not real activity, and are meant to prepare for future thefts.

Coin Metrics reviewed more than 227 million balance updates for stablecoin wallets between November 2025 and January 2026. The firm found that 38% of the updates were worth less than a penny. This pattern points to poisoning deposits. Today, stablecoin dust activity accounts for 11% of all Ethereum transactions and 26% of active addresses on an average day. Investigations link address poisoning campaigns to organized groups. These groups reuse the same infrastructure across thousands of wallets. As a result, they distort Ethereum’s network data. 

Security firm Web3 Antivirus said Thursday that address poisoning remains a common method for losing large sums of crypto.

Address poisoning is one of the most consistent ways large amounts of crypto get lost.

Here are some of the biggest address poisoning losses we’ve tracked over time, ranging from $4M to $126M. You can see different assets and years while the scam pattern remains the same.… pic.twitter.com/rJuSvkxI6L

— Web3 Antivirus (@web3_antivirus) February 5, 2026

Signature Phishing Also Increases Across the Ethereum Network

Along with address poisoning, signature phishing has also increased. Scam Sniffer reported $6.27 million stolen from 4,741 victims in January. This marked a 207% jump compared to December. Notably, just two wallets caused 65% of the total losses.

In the biggest cases, attackers stole $3.02 million from SLVon and XAUt tokens through malicious approvals. They also took $1.08 million from aEthLBTC using the same method. These scams use prompts that look normal. Once a user signs, scammers gain long-term access to the tokens. After that, they can drain funds without asking again.

One researcher explained that most victims are not careless. Instead, they follow the same steps they have used hundreds of times before. This shows that attackers exploit everyday habits, not weaknesses in the protocols themselves.

As transaction costs stay low and automation improves, analysts expect address poisoning and signature phishing to continue. For now, these scams remain easy to run and hard to stop. Until better tools and safer user habits spread, small operational mistakes will likely keep causing large losses.

Advertisement