Address Poisoning Scams on the Rise: CZ Calls for Industry Action After $50 Million Loss
Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former CEO of Binance, has sounded the alarm on address poisoning scams, urging the crypto industry to take coordinated measures to prevent such attacks. This call to action comes after a single victim lost nearly $50 million in USDT, marking one of the largest on-chain phishing losses in recent months.
The incident occurred when the victim withdrew funds from Binance and sent a small test transaction of 50 USDT to the correct destination address. However, minutes later, the user copied an address from their transaction history and sent 49,999,950 USDT to another wallet that was very similar to the intended recipient. The fraudulent address had been planted by attackers through a previous microtransaction, a common tactic in address poisoning scams.
How Address Poisoning Scams Work
Address poisoning, also known as “dusting,” is a form of phishing where attackers send tiny amounts of crypto to wallets from addresses designed to look almost identical to legitimate addresses. If users later copy an address from their transaction history instead of a verified source, they may unknowingly paste the attacker’s address. Matching the first few and last characters of a wallet address is often enough to fool users, especially when transferring large amounts.
Security firms say the tactic is on the rise, with SlowMist and other analysts identifying address poisoning as a growing threat, particularly on networks with low transaction fees where attackers can operate at scale. TRM Labs has documented extensive dusting activity on the TRON blockchain, where free or near-free transfers allow bots to flood wallets with fake transactions.
Source: TRM Labs
Industry Response and Proposed Solutions
Zhao addressed the incident in a public post, describing it as a problem that the industry should completely eliminate. He suggested that wallets automatically flag and block known poison addresses using simple blockchain queries and warn users before sending transactions. He also called on industry security groups to maintain real-time blacklists that wallets could consult before execution, and suggested filtering out spam transactions entirely so users don’t see dust transfers in their histories.
Binance Wallet, he said, is already implementing some of these protections. The $50 million loss comes amid a broader rise in cryptocurrency-related scams. Industry estimates suggest that nearly $90 billion has been lost to hacks and exploits since crypto’s inception, with more than $9 billion recorded in 2025 alone.
Source: Chainalysis
US authorities reported that Americans lost about $9.3 billion to crypto investment scams in 2024, a sharp increase compared to the previous year. The legislature has also reacted, with US Senators Elissa Slotkin and Jerry Moran recently proposing the SAFE Crypto Act. For more information, visit https://cryptonews.com/news/cz-address-poisoning-fix-50m-loss/
