Solana Wallet Sent $30,750 After $10 Test to Lookalike

A Solana wallet sent $10 in USDT to its Gate.io deposit address on Nov. 17, 2025. Twelve seconds later, a lookalike address sent a small amount of cryptocurrency to the wallet. The wallet then sent a second $10 test payment to the lookalike address before transferring 30,749.80 USDT to it.

The incident is an example of address poisoning. In this type of scam, a fraudulent address is made to resemble one a wallet owner has used before. A small incoming transfer places the address in the wallet’s transaction history, where the owner may later copy it instead of checking the full address.

Bitquery identified 4,497,798 Solana wallets targeted by lookalike addresses between Oct. 30, 2025, and Oct. 7, 2026. The figure covers wallets that met Bitquery’s criteria for targeting and does not mean that all of them lost funds.

For this count, Bitquery looked for wallets that sent at least $1 in SOL, USDC or USDT on a given day and later received dust or a fake stablecoin token from another address. The fraudulent address had to match at least three characters at both the beginning and end of the legitimate payment address.

Bitquery used a smaller group to estimate losses. Among about 3 million wallets identified as poisoned through July 9, 2026, 1,104 made qualifying payments totaling $940,106. The calculation included payments of at least $1 made within 90 days of the first dust transfer. A payment made later could qualify if additional dust arrived on that day.

The total excludes wallets poisoned after July 9 and payments outside those conditions. Bitquery also excluded address pairs that appeared to have an existing relationship, including earlier payments or repayments. That filter may have removed some genuine theft cases.

Receiving a small unsolicited transfer does not itself remove funds from a wallet. The loss occurs when the owner later approves a payment to the fraudulent address. Phantom advises users to avoid copying addresses from transaction histories, check the full recipient address and confirm the network before sending. The wallet provider says it cannot recover tokens sent to an incorrect address.