The ETHEREUM wallet from 2015 only passed $4.6 million —. and escaped from a live phishing trap.
One of the oldest Ethereum wallets has suddenly become active.
And what happened next shows how sophisticated blockchain scams have become.
The wallet was created during the ETHEREUMS GENESIS.
Its first ETH came in July 2015, when the ethereum blockchain was first launched.
The address later received an additional 755 ETH in March 2016.
Then it lay dormant for years.
Until November 9, 2026.
The wallet finally initiated its first outgoing transaction.
But the owner did not immediately move the entire balance.
First, they sent a test transaction of 0.05 ETH to a new wallet address.
This little test provoked an immediate reaction.
Within three minutes, fraudsters are already targeting the wallet.
Automated attackers have created addresses that closely resemble the legitimate target.
They then sent small amounts of ETH to the original wallet, attempting to insert fraudulent addresses into its transaction history.
The technique is known as address poisoning.
And it's surprisingly dangerous.
Many wallet interfaces only display the first and last characters of an Ethereum address.
Attackers take advantage of this by creating addresses that look similar at a glance.
If the victim copies one of those fake addresses from the recent transaction history, the next transfer can go directly to the attacker.
In this incident, one malicious address sent 43 small dust transactions.
It is clear that the attackers tried to influence which address the owner chose.
But the strategy failed.
About 38 minutes after the initial check, the original wallet transferred 2,154.94 ETH to the intended address.
This represented roughly $4.6 million at the time.
And the legitimate destination received the funds.
The attackers did not catch the transfer.
The incident illustrates an important distinction.
ETHEREUM itself has not been hacked.