DEA Gets Tricked: Agency Loses $55,000 in Address Poisoning Scam

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has yet to find those responsible for the attack, but has requested FBI assistance .

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The US Drug Enforcement Administration – the agency responsible for enforcing the country's drug laws – lost $55,000 in Tether (USDT) seized earlier this year at the hands of a scammer.< /p>

Forbes reported on August 24 that in May, the agency seized over $500,000 worth of USDT from two Binance accounts it suspected of laundering money from drug sales in connection with of a multi-year survey.

The funds were placed in DEA-controlled Trezor crypto wallets and stored securely, according to a search warrant viewed by Forbes. As part of standard forfeiture processing, the DEA sent a test amount of just over $45 in USDT to the U.S. Marshals Service.

A blockchain sleuth detected the transaction, then quickly set up a crypto wallet with the same first five and last four characters of the Marshals account – a scam tactic known as “address poisoning

The scammer deposited a token in the DEA wallet so that the spoofed address appears as a recent transaction, thus tricking the owner into accidentally transferring funds to the wrong address.

I almost fell victim to an address poisoning scam.

I sent a second transmission to someone right after the first, and I got lazy and just copied and pasted their address from my transaction history.

Yes, copy-paste the poison tx address.

Just before confirming, @Rabby_io informed me that I had never… pic.twitter.com/XlHPTs8PZy

-NOT....