A phishing scammer recently nabbed $20 million in USDT from an unsuspecting victim using a zero transfer phishing attack, reported blockchain security firm PeckShield on Tuesday.

The stolen funds were frozen in short order by Tether – the issuer behind USDT – raising questions about who the victim was given the speed of their response.

The Zero Transfer Phishing Attack

According to PeckShield, the victim address intended to send funds to one wallet, but was fooled into sending the USDT to a phishing address that began and ended with the same set of characters.

Days earlier, the victim had received 10 million USDT from Binance, and had sent those funds to the desired alternative address. However, at the time of that transfer, the scammer conducted a zero-value token transfer from the victim’s address to their phishing address.

#PeckShieldAlert A #ZeroTransfer scammer grabbed 20M $USDT from 0x4071…9Cbc.
Intended Address: 0xa7B4BAC8f0f9692e56750aEFB5f6cB5516E90570
Phishing Address: 0xa7Bf48749D2E4aA29e3209879956b9bAa9E90570#Tether $USDT has already added the scammer’s address 0xa7bf…0570 to the…