Ethereum Genesis Wallet Wakes Up After 11 Years and Dodges an Address Poisoning Trap

A wallet that received ether in Ethereum’s very first block back in July 2015 has finally made an outgoing transfer. The address, 0x7dDd57165c87A2707f025DCFC2508c09834759Bc, also took in 755 ETH in March 2016 and then sat untouched until late Monday. At 22:04 UTC it sent a 0.05 ETH test payment, worth roughly $106, to a fresh address starting with 0x1321beb8 and ending in 1A44, a move Whale Alert picked up.

How Address Poisoning Targeted the Old Wallet

Within three minutes, tiny deposits began landing in the dormant wallet from two lookalike addresses, one beginning 0x13211f and the other 0x1321FB, both ending in 1A44. Etherscan tags the accounts that funded them as Fake_Phishing, and the busier one sent 43 dust transfers. Most wallet apps show only the start and end of an address, so scammers copy those characters and hope the owner pastes the wrong one from recent history. Bots scan for big, sleeping wallets, and a test payment suggests a larger transfer is coming.

The Owner Avoided the Trap

The owner sent 0.01 ETH onward at 22:20 UTC, and nearly all of it returned three minutes later. At 22:42 UTC, the old wallet then moved 2,154.94 ETH, about $4.6 million, to the correct address, which now holds around 2,155 ETH.

Citi warned in January that poisoning spam was pushing up Ethereum’s record transaction counts, with many transfers worth under $1.