Topic: Have you ever been dusted!! Don't panic (Read 297 times)

Every addresses are made public once they sent out some coins or they receive some coins, for example every coins have their block explorer, even if you get a new wallet today and you send some coins from an exchange into the wallet it will be visible on Etherscan and others. ..

Once it sends or receive it become public and others can view how much tokens and coins you have in the wallet, what they can't find out is who the real owner of the wallet is, so scammers can send fake tokens or NFTs to the wallet, hoping that you take a step.

Most people got scammed this way because they got greedy, seeing free tokens in their wallet will make them misbehave, they will start finding ways to sell the free tokens or coin, and this will lead them to the wrong or malicious link where they will end up getting scammed.

I think that sending the dust token to a genesis block should be the safest thing to do in such a scenerio when a scammer sends you the token to scam you, so that he'll meet a dead end there. Ofcourse the price for this is the transaction fees, especially as it's high now, but it's a high price to pay if you want to completely move on from the scammer's reader.

This has been actually helpful as i know only a lot about dust buy this have actually broadened my view about dust and i think i can now know how best to hand it if it happens buy rhen is there a way to avoid been dusted in the first place so we don't have to start having to fight it when it has already started in our wallet already, i think going by that which you have explained you can possibly abandon the wallet and use a different wallet for your future transactions so you don't have to battle all of such issues again.

Thanks for sharing your experience in this forum, so that newbies and other members will not fall victim to those scammers because it use to pain when scammers succeeded to hack someone wallet to withdraw coins without the person permission.

 Now that you have exposed them in this new strategy they are using to scam newbies, I guess they will try another tactics but they will be expose again because many people that experienced such thing has shared their experience, that make many people to learn so that they will be free from such scammers in the community.

 I know that many people will not be panic, if they see something like this in the future, and what will come to their mind, this is a scammer because they have seen something like that from this trend that impact them.

I don't know how scammers manage to know which wallet has some funds in it to target, from what I heard they send lots of micro transactions to multiple addresses, but how do they get this addresses, are they guessed or is they a way they find them.

Although I have never been dusted before, I have come across several posts like this talking about this dusting attack as a strategy hackers use to steal ones coins  unsuspectingly.
Now that I have read and comprehended what it means, I would try as much to avoid ever being dusted, mostly because I have been thinking about trying to earn tokens that can accumulated and converted to cryptocurrencies.

 I wonder if such tokens in my sweatcoin app wallet can get dusted like this or such can happen if my wallet is connected to cryptocurrencies exchange platform where the dusters may have gotten my information from?

Many times or almost all the time. Some sending soam tokens or coins that even have value which I believe is just a bait for you to use it or sell it but its only a way to lure you to a potential hack. There are different kind of dusting mostly are soam tokens and sometime small amount of eth or fake nft or tokens that integrated on real or original projects which you could foreseen as real. So be careful best move is to avoid them or ignore when you are using such as etherscan or depends on the network you used.

By customizing the fee option, you can freeze the transaction from which you do not want to spend the same address. using an open source wallet gives you many options that may enhance your privacy.

It is only realistic to freeze fund in an address that has small bitcoin in value, our bitcoins and dusts we received.

If that address has big value, freeze all fund in that address is not good choice.

Sending Bitcoin from specific address in core & electrum wallet – Coin control

I'm using Electrum and there's a simple solution - click "freeze funds" on the address that received dust (it has no balance other than the dust).The whole point of dusting is sending it to empty addresses with known identity, hoping that the owner will make new transactions with that address and link it to other addresses. It makes no sense to send dust to addresses with balance because they will be used at some point.

I have received dust many times in the last years, mainly in addresses with positive balance (I don't check the empty ones often, so I don't know whether I receive something there). As far as I'm aware, that's not a big issue since there is no need to send dust in order to track the transactions from or to that address since the blockchain is public.

IMO, the moral should be keep things tidy, the same if you received dust or not. Although a single point of failure is enough to break your privacy, the more mistakes you make the more chances of being tracked and, eventually, attacked. So it is a good idea to create throw-away addresses while being aware that every time you consolidate you may be sharing too much info.

I'm not certain the crypto you're referring to, but with Bitcoin doing nothing is not the best idea. Wallets randomly pick UTXOs from your wallet to send when you initiate your transaction, if the dust transaction is added to it, the hacker can draw links between your different address and track them, which is the worst case scenario in dust attacks.

You should use coin control to freeze the dust UTXO so it's never spent from your wallet.

The solution to this is Do Nothing.

Almost all crypto wallets addresses that have make a single transaction are exposed to scammers, all they have to do is send you some fake token to every addresses that they can find.

They will now sit back and hope that you get greedy, trying yo sell what's not yours, then you will be directed to a website that was created by these scammers, now you trying to sell the token will end up causing you to lose all your tokens and coins in the wallet.

Even as a Hardware wallet user, I have received these dust tokens, if you don't go after what's not yours you don't be in problem.

I wrote a post about dusting, many moons ago.

Dust Attack, what it is, why it is dangerous and how to prevent falling to it

I do hope you find it useful. There is a lot of information on what dusting attacks are, and why this is not problematic when handled correctly.
The punchline is anyway correct: do not panic!

With such high fees, it is rare that you will get a random dust attack, if you do, make sure to strengthen your privacy measures by either starting a full node through Tor or at least passing your wallet through Tor, mixing your coins, using coincontrol especially if you want Maintain your privacy.
In the past, these attacks aimed to raise Bitcoin fees, but the fees are currently high, and there are other methods of spam. Therefore, if you are concerned about your privacy, think carefully if you are receiving a lot of dust money.

First thing to do when you receive this kind of attempt for an attack is to ignore the sender, why they are doing so is to create an address that is similar to the one  you're using, so that when you receive fund from them and the next time you wanted to send out fund, you will mistakenly copy their own address instead of yours since they lookalike, this is why you must always cross check the address you're sending fund to, make sure it's right, then delete any address that you don't want to appear under your history or make use of the wallet address directly without copying from the history.

Yes the fee is high.

Dust coin can be as low 294 sat for segwit addresses. The network has not been less congested down to 10 sat/vbyte since a long time ago. Right now it is over 50 sat/vbyte for low priority.

For 1 input and 1 output segwit (bc1q) transaction, the vbyte is 110. With fee rate of 10 sat/vbyte, the sat to pay is 1100 sat. The mempool isore congested and I do not think this is really worth it to spend the coin.

I prefer to tell people to give it to charity or using a mixer for it, but that was when the transaction fee is very low.

I may just prefer to empty the wallet with necessary transactions and leave the dust coin. If it is finished, I may delete the wallet. Or if the transaction fee is low, I will send the coin out of the wallet address instead.

In addition to employing coin control to isolate dust coins and the practice of sending dust to the Genesis block address, as suggested by Charles-Tim and NotATether, it is important to avoid reusing the same Bitcoin wallet address consistently. Doing so would increase the vulnerability of users to potential dust attacks planned by scammers. Repeated use of a single address enables attackers to link the entire transaction history to that address, posing a live risk to the individual's security and privacy.

All you have to do is send the dust to the Genesis block address, something like 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa which will never move their coins or have outgoing transactions, so the attackers can have run watching a rock just sitting there.

Sure, it will cost a few sats in fees if you want the thing to be actually confirmed, but it's worth getting rid of such parasites from your wallet.

That's true for sure didn't know this but don't you think it's good for people to know what a dust attack is too. I guess some newbies might not have experience with a dust attack so I just thought on sharing.

Lol that's why I said don't panic about it, just make secured moves about it and the money is yours, i guess a better thread with more Information has been made about it.

What are Address Poisoning Scams? (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.61556293)
Address Poisoning Scam. (https://support.metamask.io/hc/en-us/articles/11967455819035-Address-poisoning-scams)

Wow never had this strategy in mind. Thanks for the heads up

Dust is money too (depending on tx fees). Dust me al you want, I like free money.

It is little bit different on Bitcoin blockchain and altcoin blockchains but scammers can do it on both. With Bitcoin, we usually call it as dust attack and with altcoins, we often call it as Address Poisoning Scam.

What are Address Poisoning Scams?
Address Poisoning Scam.

The key to avoid these attacks are

• Have multiple wallets for different tasks and avoid using only one wallet to store your coins and interact that wallet around
• Checking carefully when you broadcast any transaction

This is not the first time am hearing about dusting attack I have read about it from a thread created by fillippone   Dust Attack, what it is, why it is dangerous and how to prevent falling to it I learn about how it works and how to control not endangering one’s wallet after the attack I think you guys should also take a look at that thread, the Op you just made mention of the dust attack capability and not how to prevent it which adding that could have help users a lot.

If you want to explain about dust attack, you should know that you need to explain about coin control. You only included in your post that the dust coin should not be spent. There are just few wallets that has coin control. Examples of wallet with coin control are Bitcoin Core, Electum, Sparrow, Bluewallet, Samourai and few others.

The best is to just use coin control to freeze the dust coin.

Lol its funny how scammers are very innovative these days, who have heard about dusting, where a scammers sends tiny bits of crypto to different wallet address. Guess what I just received the smallest sol ever, three times in a role. In case your having same experience don't panic your wallet isn't hacked or anything its just a scammer trying to get to know you. If you feel unsafe about this I'll just explain what they try to achieve by this and how you can be safe.

👉dusting attacks happen when small very negligible amont of crypto is sent to multiple addresses on a network. In case it happens to you dont panic its not such a big deal but you must understand why they do this in other not to further fall a victim cause its a means to an end and they usually use crypto with very low fees like sol, I've experienced it mostly on sol about four times now.

From my research I've found out that this is why they dust
👉to find out who own the wallet don't know how they do this tho
👉to track your transaction: this is possible since transaction are recorded on a ledger and they just need to track the dusted funds as its been moved with other funds


👉to find out active wallets

How to be safe
👉 something this dusted fund can come with a link in their description. So you would be a fool to click, your 3 feet from falling into their trap.
👉adopt usage of wallet that prioritize privacy and try not to spend that dusted fund, since they are majorly trying to get information through tracking your transaction and don't bother moving funds to a new wallet they can still track that except new wallet has more privacy.

This is just one way that scammers use to compromise privacy But it's not such a big deal if you know wat it is and know not to panic or fall for any Link trick they mostly add to the transaction description.

Stay safe.