Address Poisoning

Address poisoning is a scam that plants a lookalike address in a victim's history so a future copy-paste sends funds to the attacker instead of the intended recipient.

Address poisoning preys on how users pick recipient addresses from past transactions. The attacker generates a vanity address whose first and last characters match one the victim regularly uses, then sends a zero-value or dust transfer so it appears in the victim's history. Later, copying the recipient from history rather than the address book, the victim pastes the attacker's lookalike and loses the funds. On-chain labels flag the poisoning transaction and the fraudulent address, and fund-flow tracing follows any stolen value. It shares dust-based mechanics with dusting attacks but targets human error rather than clustering.