A large investor in Shenzhen recently had an experience that sounded the alarm again. In just 10 hours, 50 million USDT evaporated into thin air, and the entire process did not involve any hacker techniques, but rather exposed the habitual vulnerabilities that we tend to overlook.

How does a scam succeed? The process is actually not complicated.

First is the "trial" stage. The scammer transfers 50 USDT to the real address of the large investor, and after confirming that the transfer is normal, the other party completely lets down their guard. Immediately afterward, the bad deed comes - the scammer generates a "Li Gui" address, changing only the middle characters while keeping the beginning and end the same, and then transfers 0.005 USDT to the large investor. The real purpose of this small transfer is to access the large investor's recent transaction history.

When Large Investors were about to execute that large transfer, to save trouble, they directly copied the top record from the wallet's "Recent Transactions" — it happened to be the fake address that the Hacker had just deposited. 50 million USDT was sent out just like that.

The subsequent steps were even more of a blitz: USDT was immediately exchanged for DAI (to avoid freezing), followed by the purchase of 16,262 ETH, and finally laundered completely through a mixer. The traces on the entire asset chain disappeared in an instant, making recovery virtually impossible.

The core of this scam lies not in technology, but in the precise exploitation of human nature. Two lethal habitual weaknesses are perfectly captured: one is our laziness, the tendency to trust system records rather than verifying character by character; the second is the visual blind spot, where we often only hurriedly verify the first and last few digits of an address, while the middle part is easily overlooked.

Scammers get a complete wealth plunder at the lowest cost (only 0.005 USDT). This is also the most brutal aspect of on-chain transfers - there is no undo button, no regrets. Once confirmed, it is a permanent transfer.

So, take an extra 30 seconds to double-check the address before transferring next time. This is not being overly cautious; it's a basic rule for survival on the chain.