Exploiter Steals $68M Worth of Crypto Through Address Poisoning

A cryptocurrency user has lost $68 million worth of wrapped bitcoin (WBTC) after falling victim to an address poisoning exploit, according to blockchain security firm CertiK.

Address poisoning is a technique that involves tricking the victim into sending a legitimate transaction to the wrong wallet address by mimicking the first and last six characters of the true wallet address and depending on the sender to miss the discrepancy in the intervening characters. Wallet addresses can be as long as 42 characters.

In this case, the exploiter mimicked a 0.05 ether (ETH) transaction before receiving 1,155 WBTC from the victim.

Security platform Cyvers and blockchain sleuth ZachXBT confirmed that $68 million had been lost to an address poisoning scam.

Crypto investors lost $2 billion to hacks, scams and exploits across decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2023 and an additional $333 million was stolen in the first quarter.