A crypto investor lost a staggering $2.6 million USDT on May 26, 2025, after falling victim twice within three hours to a sophisticated phishing scam that manipulated Ethereum’s transaction history through zero-value transfers. Could this devastating double-hit expose a critical blind spot in how even experienced traders verify wallet addresses?
The attack, which first siphoned off $843,000 and another $1.75 million, has raised serious concerns about how even seasoned traders verify wallet addresses in on-chain transactions.
The Mechanics: Zero-Value Transfers and Onchain Phishing
According to a report by crypto compliance firm Cyvers, the scammers used Ethereum’s transferFrom function to create transactions from the victim’s wallet to spoofed addresses without needing any private key signature or user authorization.
Since the transactions involved no real value, they were automatically added to the blockchain without triggering typical security alerts.
This attack works by placing the scammer’s wallet address in the victim’s transaction history. Users who see the address logged as an outbound transaction are more likely to trust it, mistaking it for a previously interacted or known address.
In follow-up transactions, they may copy and paste the spoofed address, unknowingly sending tangible assets directly to the attacker.
Zero-value transfers are considered an advanced evolution of the older address poisoning scam.
In traditional address poisoning, scammers send tiny amounts of cryptocurrency from addresses closely resembling the victim’s legitimate contacts, often with the same starting and ending characters.
Users who rely on pattern recognition or partial address verification are more likely to fall into the trap.
Zero-value transfers take this one step further by adding the fake transaction to the user’s visible history, reinforcing false legitimacy.
Blockchain security firm Elliptic reported in 2023 that roughly 150 scammers had initiated over 176,000 of these Ethereum and BNB Chain transactions since November 2022.
While these are zero-value transactions, executing them requires considerable gas fees.
The scammers have spent over $710,000 on fees but earned more than $1.5 million in illicit proceeds, resulting in a net profit of just under $800,000, averaging about $5,500 per attacker.
In a notable precedent in May 2024, a victim of a sophisticated address poisoning scam recovered nearly all of the $71 million in stolen WBTC, thanks to swift intervention by blockchain security firm Match Systems and exchange Cryptex.
Broader Impact and Defensive Measures Against Phishing Scam
The rise of zero-value transfer scams has exposed a troubling vulnerability in user behavior and how wallet interfaces present transaction data.
A January 2025 report revealed over 270 million address poisoning attempts occurred on BNB Chain and Ethereum between July 2022 and June 2024. Out of these, about 6,000 attempts were successful, resulting in losses exceeding $83 million.
In response, the crypto ecosystem has started adapting. In 2023, Etherscan announced a new feature that hides zero-value token transfers by default to shield users from misleading transaction records.
While users can still choose to view them, the default setting aims to reduce confusion and prevent phishing attempts from reaching the average wallet owner.
Crypto wallet providers like Trezor have issued warnings about address poisoning and emphasized that such phishing scams, while insidious, do not involve any compromise of private keys or internal wallet security.
Instead, they rely on human error and behavioral exploitation, targeting the visual habits of users who recognize addresses by appearance or copy-paste from transaction logs without double-checking.
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