Crypto User Fat Fingers Pays $90K For $2K ETH Transfer
An anonymous crypto user apparently spent $90,000 in gas bills for a simple transfer of $2,200 in Ether.
The user 34.26 Ether (ETH) – worth 89,200 dollars at the current price – to transfer 0.87 ETH in gas, the price is only 2,262 dollars, according to Etherscan data on August 11 to X by anonymous user DeFiac.
At the time of publication, gas fees on the Ethereum network are hovering at an annual low of between 2 and 4 gwei, which means that an ETH transfer should only be a maximum of $5. Expressed as a percentage, the user paid over 1,783,900%.
In the crypto space, so-called “fat finger” transactions are not common.
On October 10, 2023, an NFT trader paid a whopping 1,055 ETH – $1.6 million at the time – for just $1,000 of NFT.
On April 6, an OpenSea collector released 100 ETH — $191,000 at the time — on a free NFT coin, sparking accusations of sleazy trading.
And it's not just retail participants who make mistakes with transfers. In May 2021, Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com accidentally sent $7 million to Thevamanogari Manivel, an Australian user of the exchange.
Manivel never reported the loss and used the money to buy a multi-million dollar mansion in Melbourne and send about $4 million to an overseas bank account. She was sentenced to 209 days in jail for “handling the proceeds of crime.”
It's not always a fat-finger mistake
While overpaying gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet can be accidental, it can also be a sophisticated financial scam.
The user must verify which Ethereum validator validates the given transaction and whether it is entered in the correct block.
Related: Ordinary Traders Get Bitcoin Back After Fat-Finger NFT Purchases
From there, the anonymous user had to work with that verifier at the lock level to make sure the money wasn't distributed to the wrong party.
In its October 2023 report, crypto staking firm Northstake found that overall illegal and high-risk activity across three Ethereum staking protocols and some mainnet areas hovered between 0.46% and 1.56%.
While this number is relatively low, Northstack says it raises concerns from regulatory bodies to widely undermine decentralized finance based on liquidity staking protocols and Ethereum.
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