An Ethereum Wallet Holder Just Lost Nearly $2.6 Million in Two Tether (USDT) Transactions Today

An Ethereum wallet holder just lost nearly $2.6 million in two Tether (USDT) transactions today, May 26, after reportedly copying a fake wallet address by mistake.

An Ethereum wallet holder has reportedly lost nearly $2.6 million in two Tether (USDT) transactions after copying a fake wallet address by mistake.

The large-value transfers were flagged by blockchain security monitoring tool ScamSniffer within a short window, raising immediate concerns over possible exploit-linked behavior or unauthorized asset movement.

The sender’s wallet, which begins with the identifier “0x86C0300F,” made two high-value USDT transactions to the same suspicious recipient wallet address, “0x4668EE74.” The first, smaller transaction of about 843,166.83 USDT went through at approximately 10:58 AM ET on Thursday, May 25.

A second, even larger transaction of around 1,754,893.45 USDT followed at around 3:17 PM ET on Thursday. Together, these two transactions add up to a staggering 2,598,060.29 USDT lost.

ScamSniffer flagged the activity due to the repetition of such large transfers between the same two addresses in a short timeframe. This is behavior often seen in address spoofing incidents, where scammers create fake addresses that closely mimic legitimate ones, or in cases of mistaken fund redirection due to copy-paste errors from tainted transaction histories.

The sender is reportedly the same individual who previously lost $840,000 in a separate spam-related address manipulation incident. This history makes the current loss even more tragic and highlights the persistent nature of these attack vectors.

According to the publicly available transaction records, a total of twelve separate USDT movements were logged between the sender’s and the recipient’s wallet. Most of these prior movements involved zero-value transactions.

These zero-value transfers are often used by scammers to “poison” a user’s transaction history with look-alike addresses, hoping the user will accidentally copy the fake address for a future, larger transaction. The appearance of such probing transfers in this wallet’s history adds further weight to suspicions of ongoing malicious activity targeting the victim

The second large, loss-making transaction was reported to have occurred just 11 minutes before ScamSniffer identified and flagged the suspicious activity. The earlier, smaller (but still substantial) transfer was made about four hours before that. ScamSniffer noted that the wallet’s interaction history likely played a crucial role in this costly error, with the victim potentially copying the fake address from their prior transfer logs, a common pitfall for users not meticulously verifying recipient addresses.

No smart contract interactions or known service provider engagements were linked to the recipient wallet that received the nearly $2.6 million in USDT. The absence of any external transaction metadata strongly increases the likelihood that these USDT transfers were not part of any legitimate service or payment but were instead directly sent to an address controlled by a scammer or an attacker exploiting a user error.