Cheaper Fees on Ethereum Fuel Surge in Address Poisoning Scams - Crypto Economy

TL;DR

• Fusaka fee reduction triggers explosion in address poisoning attacks.
• Attackers send millions of dust transactions at negligible cost.
• Daily transactions jump from 30,000 to 167,000 after the upgrade.

The reduction in gas fees on Ethereum following the Fusaka upgrade in December 2025 generated an unintended side effect: an exponential increase in address poisoning attacks. What was meant to improve network accessibility ended up becoming a breeding ground for scammers who can now send millions of dust transactions at negligible cost.

Leon Waidmann, head of research at Lisk, highlighted the current paradox on X. Stablecoin volume reached $7.5 trillion in a single quarter, while transaction fees remained below one dollar. “Record usage. Record cheap. At the same time,” he wrote, pointing to the largest divergence between fundamentals and price in the crypto ecosystem.

Blockchain researcher Andrey Sergeenkov published a study revealing how address poisoning attacks skyrocketed after Fusaka. The upgrade reduced gas fees sixfold, making operations cheap enough to scale these types of fraud.

Millions in Losses Within Just Two Months

The address poisoning mechanism involves sending small transfers from addresses that mimic the victim’s regular contacts. If the user copies the wrong address from their history for a subsequent transaction, funds end up in attackers’ hands. Sergeenkov describes the practice as a lottery: scammers send millions of low-cost transactions hoping for a few large payoffs.

Before Fusaka, attackers sent approximately 30,000 dust transactions per day, according to Sergeenkov’s analysis of 101 tokens between September 2025 and February 2026. After the upgrade, the figure jumped to 167,000 daily, with a peak of 510,000 on a single day in January.


The economic consequences are telling. In just over two months after Fusaka, victims lost more than $63 million. That figure multiplies by 13 the $4.9 million stolen in a comparable period before the upgrade.


A single transfer, which occurred on December 19, 2025, concentrated a large portion of the losses by stealing $50 million in USDT. Even excluding that case, thefts reached $13.3 million, 2.7 times higher than in the previous period.

Sergeenkov criticized the prioritization of growth over security: “There is nothing wrong with lowering fees, but the security problems that cheap transactions amplify should have been addressed before the upgrade. When the Ethereum Foundation claims it is building trillion-dollar security, user safety must be the strictest priority over growth metrics.“