The whale who spent $43 million in two hours to buy 18,800 $ETH—everyone’s guessing who it is. But I want you to focus on something else: while he was buying, a group of scammers was surrounding him, poisoning his transactions. I dug through all the records for address 0x9EcA…5547: between 07:44 and 09:50, he acquired 18,860 ETH at an average price of ~$2,281. He then split the holdings into 18 transfers: 15,085 ETH went to 0x65C3…B841, and 3,617.94 ETH went to 0xBe95…aA85A. Every time he sent a legitimate transaction, within seconds—sometimes as fast as ten seconds—near-identical fake addresses sent him zero-value or dust transfers: 0x65C3ab…b841, 0xBe95ff…a85a. These fakes matched the real addresses exactly at the start and end. By 10:00, eight spoofed addresses had sent a total of 78 such transactions—including one that mimicked the address that had sent him USDC. Even the receiving addresses weren’t spared: at 08:41, when it attempted to send out 44 ETH, within nine minutes it received four fake “replies” from three spoofed addresses. The scammers are betting on one thing: next time you send funds, you’ll skip verifying the full address and just copy a “familiar” one from your history. Even a $43 million whale is being watched this way—and this trick works on everyone. The larger the transfer, the bigger the target. When you send funds, do you verify the full address—or just check the first and last few characters?