Address Poisoning After Fusaka: How Ethereum's Fee Cut Handed Scammers a 612% Boost — And What You Can Do About It

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade shipped in December 2025 with a simple promise: cheaper transactions for everyone. Fees dropped roughly 67%. Rollups cheered, NFT minters cheered, and address-poisoning bots really cheered — because the same fee reduction that made micro-payments viable also made industrialized fraud dirt-cheap. By March 2026 the numbers are staggering. Etherscan reported a 612% surge in USDT dust transfers under $0.01 since Fusaka. A crypto influencer lost $24 million in a single poisoned-address paste in March alone. The technique isn't new — 17 million attempts were logged between 2022 and 2024 — but the economics have fundamentally shifted. Let's break down exactly how this attack works at the transaction level, why Fusaka made it worse, and what developers and users can do right now. How Address Poisoning Actually Works Address poisoning exploits a UX flaw, not a smart-contract flaw. The attack chain: Monitor: A bot watches the mempool (or indexed on-chain history) for tr