I’ve been in the crypto space for a few years now, and I always considered myself reasonably careful. But even with experience, I still fell for one of the simplest yet most dangerous scams—clipboard hijacking malware.

It happened on a regular afternoon. I was transferring $3,700 worth of Bitcoin from my desktop wallet to a new cold wallet I had just set up. I copied the receiving address from the hardware wallet app, switched to my Bitcoin wallet, pasted the address, reviewed it once (too quickly), and hit send. The transaction was confirmed within minutes.

But the Bitcoin never arrived at my cold wallet.

I went back to double-check the transaction, and that’s when I noticed it—the recipient address in the transaction history wasn’t the one I had copied. It had been replaced by a similar-looking address, one that matched the beginning and end of my intended address but was entirely different in the middle. It dawned on me: I had clipboard malware on my computer.

This kind of malware silently monitors your clipboard. The moment you copy a crypto address, it swaps it with the scammer’s address. Since crypto addresses are long and complicated, most people—including me—don’t notice minor changes. That’s exactly how they get you.

I ran multiple scans afterward and confirmed my computer had been infected by malicious software I unknowingly downloaded weeks earlier. By then, the stolen BTC had already been transferred through mixers and sent to other wallets. There was nothing I could do.

The worst part wasn’t just the financial hit—it was knowing that one simple habit of double-checking or using a QR scanner instead of copy-paste could have saved me. I now always triple-check every address, verify the first 6 and last 6 characters, and run my transactions through a test first before sending large amounts. I also switched to using a dedicated offline device just for crypto operations.

This experience taught me something every crypto user needs to understand: one tiny moment of inattention can cost you everything.