Analyzing the 90 days before and after the December 3rd Ethereum Fusaka upgrade, we see a sharp increase in the number of address poisoning scams.
Stablecoin transactions on Ethereum are one of the hardest hit by this growing problem.
Dust transfer increases rapidly due to price reduction
Researcher Wise Crypto says there has been a spike in dust attacks across the Ethereum ecosystem. They wrote in X on March 13th that there has been a significant increase in movement, especially in stablecoins.
The number of USDT transfers under $0.01 increased by 612%, from approximately 4.2 million to 29.9 million. A similar thing happened with USDC, where the number of transactions increased by 473% from 2.6 million to 14.7 million. Most of the time there was movement of dust. $ETH DAI increased by 470% and 62%, respectively. The first round saw 65.2 million new transfers.
Address poisoning campaigns insert fake addresses with nearly identical starting and ending characters to the real address into a victim’s transaction history, hoping that users will copy the address when sending money. The wallet interface often shows only the shortened address, making spoofed entries appear genuine.
In one case, on-chain researcher Specter reported that a victim lost $50 million in an address poisoning attack in late December 2025. Another blockchain enthusiast, while replying to Wise Crypto’s post, reported a case where a single wallet address lost more than $388,000 in these attacks.
Analysts at EtherScan believe the problem is due to Ethereum’s fusaka upgrade. This relatively improved network scalability and reduced the transmission cost of dust transfer while reducing fees. As a result, attackers are able to run much larger campaigns than before.
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Industrialized fraud targeting high-value wallets
In a study covering the period from July 2022 to June 2024, security researchers found that there were more than 17 million phishing attacks targeting approximately 1.3 million users of the Ethereum network. The result was a loss of more than $79 million.
The method relies on scale rather than precision, and analysts note that in some cases, a single legitimate stablecoin movement can result in dozens of poisoning transactions within minutes. In fact, an X user known as Nima reported receiving over 89 notifications after just two stablecoin transfers, demonstrating the efficiency of the automated script.
According to a study cited by Etherscan, only one in 10,000 attempts to move dust is successful. Therefore, a malicious attacker is playing a long-term numbers game by sending millions of such transactions.
Block Explorer is explained in the following post:
“One successful attack with large transfers can easily cover the cost of thousands of failed attacks.”
According to Wise Crypto, the best defense remains simple. Always verify the full destination address before transferring funds and avoid directly copying the wallet address from your transaction history.
