The Ten-Year Ethereum Silence Broken by a $4.6M Move and a Trap Set in Three Minutes

(SeaPRwire) –   An Ethereum wallet active since July 2015 just moved roughly $4.6 million after sitting completely dormant for over a decade. That long silence ended on November 9 at 22:04 UTC when the owner sent a minor 0.05 ETH test payment to a new destination. Within three minutes, malicious actors flooded the recent activity tab with lookalike addresses designed to exploit copy-paste habits.

The core incident exposes a glaring flaw in how human operators interact with blockchain ledters. Address poisoning requires zero protocol exploits or stolen private keys. Attackers simply monitor outgoing test transactions, generate fake addresses matching the starting and ending characters of the legitimate recipient, and spam the target’s transaction history with dust amounts.

Official blockchain forensics trace the dormant wallet as 0x7dDd…59Bc, which first received funds in the genesis block and added another 755 ETH in March 2016. After more than ten years of zero outgoing transfers, the November test payment triggered immediate automated deception. Two lookalike accounts, both ending in 1A44 and flagged as fake phishing by Etherscan, deployed multiple micro-transfers to push a counterfeit destination into recent logs.

Industry subtext reveals that this specific attack vector scales effortlessly through automated scripts monitoring public mempools. Bitquery analytics covering Ethereum mainnet through July 31, 2026, tracked nearly 67 million poisoning attempts across eight million wallets, resulting in at least $76.1 million in measured losses. A single December 2025 victim lost nearly $50 million in USDT after executing a routine $50 test payment that failed to immunize them against subsequent history poisoning.

Despite the automated trap deploying 43 small dust transfers from one lookalike account alone, the primary asset movement bypassed the fake destinations entirely. At 22:42 UTC, roughly 38 minutes after the initial test, the original wallet successfully transferred 2,154.94 ETH to the intended recipient starting with 0x1321beb8 and ending with 1A44.

While this particular whale avoided the counterfeit hook, on-chain data cannot prove how the sender verified the destination or why the funds moved after a decade. Wallet providers must integrate native dust filtering and treat transaction histories as untrusted interfaces to prevent future catastrophic user errors.