Copying an address from your transaction history is a high-risk bad habit. Address poisoning attackers monitor on-chain activity. Within minutes after you complete a transfer, they automatically generate a fake address with very similar starting and ending characters to an address you often use, and inject a $0 or tiny amount transaction into your history. When you get lazy and copy straight from history next time, your funds go directly to the attacker.
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Step 1: Identify and Block the Poisoning Source
【What to do】 Clean up distractions in your transaction history so poisoned addresses don't sneak into your view.
【How to do it】 In most mainstream wallets (like imToken, TokenPocket, SafePal), find and turn on "Hide Small Transactions" or "Hide Risky Transactions" in settings. Set a small amount threshold, and any $0 or extremely low-value transfers below that amount will be filtered out. This drastically reduces the chance you'll copy a poisoned address by mistake.
【Completion Standard】 After turning it on, unknown $0 USDT or dust transactions no longer appear in your history.
Common failure reason: Many people see a strange small transaction in their wallet and immediately check their balance repeatedly or worry the wallet is hacked. In reality, the transaction itself is harmless—it's just a "trap" placed in your environment for you to make a mistake during your next transfer. Do not interact with that transaction at all; simply use the wallet feature to hide it.
Step 2: Build a Transfer Habit That Doesn't Rely on History
【What to do】 Completely change how you get addresses and cut off the attack path at the source.
【How to do it】
Use an address book: Save addresses you often interact with (like your friend's wallet, exchange address, hardware wallet) into your wallet's "Address Book" or "Contacts" and label them clearly. When making a transfer, select from the address book instead of copying from history.
Use the "middle segment check" method: If you must enter an address manually, don't just check the first and last few characters. Attackers can easily generate addresses with matching starts and ends. You need to check at least "first 4 + middle 4 + last 4" characters to make sure the whole address matches.
【Completion Standard】 For every transfer, you habitually start it from the address book or by scanning a QR code, never relying on "recent recipients" from transaction history.
High risk: At the end of 2025, a user mistakenly sent 49,999,950 USDT (nearly $50 million) to an attacker's wallet by copying a poisoned similar address from transaction history. Before this huge loss, the user even made a small test transfer, but the attacker planted the poisoned address in the time gap between the test and the real transfer, making the test transfer useless.
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Step 3: Perform a Final Double-Check
【What to do】 Right before clicking "Confirm," do an independent check on the address one last time.
【How to do it】 No matter if you picked from the address book or typed it in, before the final confirmation cross-check with these methods:
Use another device or a different communication channel (like Signal, WhatsApp) to ask the receiver whether the address you are about to send to is exactly correct.
If the amount is large, send a very small sum first (like 1 USDT). After the other side confirms receipt, send the remaining funds using exactly the same address.
【Completion Standard】 You are confident that the destination address on the block explorer matches every single character of the address the receiver told you.
How to verify after the transaction: Once the transfer is successful, go to a block explorer (like Etherscan) and search for the transaction hash (TxID). On the details page, confirm again that the receiving address matches what you expected. If you find you sent to a poisoned address, stop all further actions immediately—on-chain transactions cannot be reversed, but you can prevent further losses.
