2015 Ethereum Wallet Transfers $4.6 Million, Avoids Scam

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The address has been on the Ethereum ledger since its launch. She received her first ether in July 2015, then 755 additional ETH in March 2016. Her history therefore already showed several inflows of funds. However, no shipments appeared there before November 9.

At 22:04 UTC, the wallet sent 0.05 ETH, or approximately $106, to a new address. Whale Alert reported the movement. Within three minutes, the old wallet received small amounts from two addresses similar to the recipient's. Their first characters looked the same and their last four characters were identical. According to Etherscan data reported by CoinDesk, one of these addresses made 43 microtransfers.

In the meantime, the receiving wallet itself sent 0.01 ETH to another address and received almost all of it three minutes later. At 22:42 UTC, the 2015 wallet finally sent 2,154.94 ETH to the address used for the first transfer. The blockchain makes it possible to trace these movements. The exact role of the intermediate round trip remains unknown.

Many wallet interfaces only display the beginning and end of addresses. In a history, two different recipients may therefore appear identical at first glance. “Address poisoning” exploits this resemblance. A low value transfer causes a lookalike address to appear among recent transactions.

If the user then copies it for a new shipment, they can sign a transfer to the wrong recipient themselves. In this case, the small sums received counted mainly because of the place they occupied in history. On the scale of Ethereum, their multiplication can also confuse the reading of network activity.

A test transfer confirms that the funds are arriving at the address used at that time. Its value lies in the reuse of this same address, from the verified source, and in checking the complete destination before signing. Here, the two shipments of the 2015 portfolio have arrived at the same place. Self-custody is definitely not that simple.

An editorial article. Le Journal du Coin, the first French-speaking news media on cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and blockchain protocols.

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Machine-translated from French