Ethereum Users Warned As USDT Dust Attack Jumps 612%

Researchers warn that Ethereum dust attacks are on the rise, with USDT and USDC transfers seeing huge spikes.

An analysis of the 90 days before and after the Ethereum Fusaka update of December 3 shows a significant increase in the number of address poisoning scams.

Stablecoin transactions on Ethereum are among the hardest hit by this ever-increasing problem.

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Researcher Wise Crypto says dust attacks have increased significantly across the Ethereum world. They wrote in X on March 13 that there has been a lot of growth, especially in the stablecoin movement.

The amount of USDT transfers under $0.01 increased by 612%, from about 4.2 million to 29.9 million. The same happened with USDC, where the number of transactions went from 2.6 million to 14.7 million, an increase of 473%. The most prevalent dust transfer in ETH and DAI increased by 470% and 62%, respectively. The former saw 65.2 million new transfers.

Phishing campaigns insert fake addresses whose first and last characters are almost identical to the original ones in the victim’s trading history, in the hope that users will copy them when sending money. In general, because wallet interfaces only display abbreviated addresses, dirty entries will appear authentic.

In another case, on-chain investigator Specter reported that a victim lost $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 that attack while responding to Wise Crypto’s post.

Etherscan analysts say that the problem is caused by the development of Fusaka for Ethereum, which has relatively improved the stability of the network while reducing fees, therefore cutting the cost of sending dust. As a result, attackers can run campaigns at much higher volumes than before.

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In a study of the periods between July 2022 and June 2024, security researchers found that there were more than 17 million phishing attempts targeting approximately 1.3 million users of the Ethereum network. The result was more than $79 million in losses.

The approach relies on scale rather than accuracy, with analysts pointing out that in some cases, dozens of toxic operations will occur within minutes of a single legitimate stablecoin move. In fact, an X user known as Nima reported receiving more than 89 notifications just after two stablecoin transfers, in a demonstration of the effectiveness of automated scripts.

Only one in ten thousand dust transfer attempts are successful, according to research by Etherscan. So, by sending millions of such things, malicious actors are playing a long-term numbers game.

The block tester explained in a post:

“One successful attack involving a large transmission can easily cover the cost of thousands of failed attempts.”

According to Wise Crypto, the best defense is always simple: always verify the full address of the destination before sending money and avoid copying wallet addresses directly from purchase history.