After years of navigating the crypto space, you'll realize that the most terrifying thing is never market crashes, but the pitfalls we think we won't step into.

Recently, I saw a case where a big player lost 50 million USDT in a way that seemed perfectly smooth—like it was carefully orchestrated—

They withdrew some small amount from the platform first to test the waters, and it went through successfully. Then they casually transferred all their assets at once. Sounds reasonable, right?

But that's where the cleverness lies. Not long after that test transaction, the malicious actor had already forged an address in the system that looked exactly like the original—its length and structure were identical, and the beginning and end were indistinguishable. Even worse, they transferred 0.005 USDT into this fake address, making the transaction quietly sit in the records.

When the big player tried to transfer again, they casually copied the address from recent records—just this one unconscious action caused 50 million to vanish into thin air.

Once the funds arrived, the attacker immediately swapped USDT for DAI via a certain DEX, then moved it into ETH, and finally dumped everything into a mixer to disappear completely. The entire process was seamless, like a scripted "hunt."

This isn't some advanced technical vulnerability; frankly, it's about precise human psychology. We're all used to just looking at the first few and last few digits of an address, copying and pasting from records, trusting that "if I just transferred, it should be fine"—these habits are the most obvious signs in the dark forest.

Security agencies two years ago reported that losses from phishing scams increased by nearly 70%. The tactics are still the same old tricks, yet people still fall for them. Why? Ultimately, it's not that hackers are so powerful, but that we are too careless.

The longer you stay in this industry, the more you realize there are a few things that need to be repeated—never rely on memory for addresses, and never take recent transaction records too seriously. Many veterans have been burned by this.