An 11‑year‑old Ethereum wallet moves $4.6 million and narrowly escapes a hack attempt

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https://cryptoast.fr/wallet-ethereum-vieux-11-ans-deplace-46-millions-dollars-echappe-tentative-de-hack/

Certain movements on the Ethereum blockchain do not go unnoticed. This Monday, November 9, 2026, an address that has been inactive since the beginning of the network suddenly resumed service. Spotted by Whale Alert, an X account which tracks whale transactions, the operation concerns a wallet created in July 2015. It had received its first ETH from the Genesis block, the very first block of Ethereum. By March 2016, it had also hosted an additional 755 ETH. Since then, no outgoing transactions have been recorded.

After more than a decade of silence, its owner finally decided to move his funds. This Monday, late in the evening, a first test transaction of 0.05 ETH, or a little over 100 dollars, was carried out. The goal of the maneuver? Check the correct receipt of funds before a larger transfer which will not take long. Forty minutes later, the wallet sent 2,154.94 ETH to the same address. In total, nearly $4.6 million changed portfolios. If it went off without a hitch, this operation could however have taken a completely different turn.

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As CoinDesk reports, the first transaction immediately attracted the attention of several bad actors. Only 3 minutes after this test transfer, the historic wallet began to receive a series of suspicious micropayments. These transactions came from 2 addresses designed to resemble that of the real recipient. The pirates thus attempted an attack known as address poisoning, or address poisoning in plain French. According to data from Etherscan, which also reported the suspicious behavior in the transaction registry, one of the fraudulent addresses sent more than forty micropayments to it.

This method exploits a common habit among cryptocurrency users of copying an address from their transaction history. Indeed, wallet interfaces generally only display the first and last characters of addresses. Scammers therefore create similar identifiers to sow confusion. Their goal? Cause the victim to select the wrong address for their next transfer. In this specific case, the hackers hoped to recover several million dollars in ETH. Fortunately, the owner of the wallet did not let himself be tricked.

Machine-translated from French