Investment firm Bofur Capital lost $2 million in USDC after falling victim to an address poisoning attack on the Ethereum blockchain, sending the funds to a wallet controlled by scammers.
The funds went to a wallet beginning and ending 0xF0e6A496...fc19721aF, which the fraudsters had set up so its opening and closing characters almost matched the address of a real counterparty Bofur Capital regularly dealt with. Before the theft, the scammers had sent a $0.0002 USDC dust transfer to Bofur Capital's address to plant the lookalike wallet in its transaction history. An operator at the firm is thought to have copied the wrong address from that history and pasted it into a transfer field. Once they received the $2 million, the unknown attackers quickly converted the entire sum into DAI stablecoins.
Analysts said the attackers set the trap 20 hours before Bofur Capital carried out the stablecoin transaction. They believe the hackers had been monitoring the firm's wallet in anticipation of a large withdrawal and planted the fake address in advance so it would surface at the right moment.
What is address poisoning
Address poisoning is a scam in which fraudsters send tiny transactions from wallets whose addresses closely resemble a target's genuine contacts, hoping the victim will later copy the wrong address from their transaction history.
Sharp rise since Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade
The number of address poisoning attacks rose sharply this spring after Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade, according to analysts at Etherscan. They said dust transfers of USDT increased by 612% over the past three months, and one crypto investor alone lost more than 500,000 USDT. The scheme was already profitable for scammers before the upgrade.
Millions of dollars in losses
A 2025 Etherscan study covering July 2022 to June 2024, before the Fusaka upgrade, found about 17 million wallet poisoning attempts. At least 1.3 million users were affected, with total damage of at least $79.3 million, the study found. Analysts said such attacks happen 1,355% more often on networks with lower fees, such as BNB Smart Chain.
