Researchers are warning that Ethereum dust attacks have surged, with USDT and USDC transfers seeing major spikes.
Analysis of the 90 days before and after the December 3 Ethereum Fusaka upgrade indicates a steep rise in the number of address poisoning scams.
Stablecoin transactions on Ethereum are among the biggest hits with this ever-rising problem.
Dust Transfers Explode After Fee Reductions
Researcher Wise Crypto says that dust attacks went up sharply all over the Ethereum ecosystem. They wrote on X on March 13 that there had been a huge increase, especially in stablecoin movements.
The number of USDT transfers under $0.01 went up by 612%, from about 4.2 million to 29.9 million. A similar thing happened with USDC, where the number of transactions went from 2.6 million to 14.7 million, a 473% increase. Dust transfers that were mostly in ETH and DAI went up by 470% and 62%, respectively. The first one saw 65.2 million new transfers.
Address poisoning campaigns insert fake addresses whose beginning and ending characters are nearly similar to genuine ones into the victim’s trading history, hoping users will copy them when sending funds. Often, because wallet interfaces display only shortened addresses, the spoofed entries will appear genuine.
In one case, on-chain investigator Specter reported a victim losing $50 million in an address poisoning attack in late December 2025. Another blockchain enthusiast reported a case where a single wallet address lost more than $388k in those attacks while replying to Wise Crypto’s post.
Analysts at Etherscan attribute the problem to Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade, which relatively improved the network’s scalability while reducing the fees, hence cutting the costs of sending dust transfers. As a result, attackers can run campaigns at much higher volumes than before.
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In a study of periods between July 2022 and June 2024, security researchers found there were over 17 million phishing attempts targeting about 1.3 million users of the Ethereum network. The result was over $79 million in losses.
The method relies on scale rather than precision, with analysts indicating that in some cases, dozens of poisoning transactions will occur within minutes of a single legitimate stablecoin movement. In fact, an X user known as Nima reported receiving over 89 notifications after merely two stablecoin transfers, in a show of the efficiency of automated scripts.
Only one of every ten thousand dust transfer attempts is successful, according to a study cited by Etherscan. Hence, by sending millions of such transactions, malicious actors are playing a long-term numbers game.
The block explorer explained in the post:
“A single successful attack involving a large transfer can easily cover the cost of thousands of failed attempts.”
According to Wise Crypto, the best defense remains simple: always verify the full destination address before sending funds and avoid copying wallet addresses directly from transaction history.
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