The number of daily transactions on the Ethereum (ETH) network reached an all-time high. However, it turned out that this remarkable increase was due not to healthy user growth, but to a large-scale cryptocurrency scam campaign.
According to the data, the daily number of transactions on Ethereum reached a record high of over 2.8 million on January 16th. On the same day, Etherscan data also showed that the number of new Ethereum addresses created in the previous 30 days exceeded 12.6 million, marking the highest 30-day total to date.
Address Poisoning Attacks Behind Transaction Surge
However, it has been noted that a large part of this record increase stems from “mass address poisoning” attacks. According to research by independent journalist Andrey Sergeenkov, security experts also confirmed this assessment.
Immunefi’s security director, Gonçalo Magalhães, stated that address poisoning attacks are a long-standing and growing problem. In this type of attack, fraudsters send very small amounts of crypto to target wallets from fake addresses that closely resemble real addresses. The goal is to trick the user into inadvertently sending funds to this fake address by looking at their transaction history.
According to experts, this method is similar to spam phishing emails: it’s low-cost and has a low success rate; however, even if only a few people out of thousands are fooled, it can still be profitable enough for the attackers.
Significant Losses and Widespread Attacks
The damage caused by these attacks can be quite significant. Last month, one user lost $50 million in an address poisoning attack. This incident was reported by the crypto security platform Scam Sniffer. Meanwhile, Michael Pearl, vice president at Cyvers, stated that they detected over 1 million address poisoning attempts per day on the Ethereum network in just the last seven days. This highlights the widespread nature of these attacks.
User Experience and Prevention Measures
According to Magalhães, some user experience improvements in Ethereum, particularly innovations like account abstraction, can make it easier for users to unknowingly sign transactions they don’t fully understand.
Experts say the most critical point in combating such attacks is preventing users from being deceived. Just as Google’s Gmail service scans email attachments and warns users, cryptocurrency wallets should similarly clearly display risks and warn users.