The Anatomy of Address Poisoning on Ethereum: Funding Mechanisms, Scam Signatures, and Laundering via Tornado Cash

arXiv:2609.23405 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-09-20 · Read on arXiv

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-09-20

Updated: 2026-09-20

Project page: https://berkeley-defi.github.io/assets/material/Tornado%20Cash%20Whitepaper.pdf

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Address-Poisoning Transfer (APT) is a prevalent blockchain phishing scam in which a scammer poisons a victim's address book by generating a transfer with a phishing address that looks similar to a

Terminology

Abstract

Address-Poisoning Transfer (APT) is a prevalent blockchain phishing scam in which a scammer poisons a victim's address book by generating a transfer with a phishing address that looks similar to a benign address that the victim has previously interacted with. Although simple, APT phishing attacks have cost users millions of dollars in recent years, which has captured the attention of the research community (Ye et al. WWW'24, Guan-Li CCS'24, Chen et al. NDSS'25, Tsuchiya et al. USENIX'25). In this work, we go beyond detection and investigate three important and underexplored aspects of APT: scam funding mechanisms, scam signatures, and scam proceeds laundering via public services. In particular, we propose five families of scam signatures that capture key aspects of APT operations, which are useful for address clustering. We also conduct the first investigation into usage of Tornado Cash for funding APTs and laundering scam proceeds.

Sources

Related papers