Mysterious Crypto User Pays $5.2 Million In Transaction Fee for Transferring Small Quantity of Ether
In a very surprising and suspicious event, a mysterious crypto user ended up paying a whopping 10,000 ETH tokens as transaction fee for transferring just $130. On Wednesday at 10:00 UTC, an unknown wallet holder sent 0.55 ETH worth $133 by paying 10,666 ETH transaction fee worth a massive $2.6 million.
Chinese mining group Spark Pool processed the transaction and received the fee while distributing the millions to its members. A normal transaction fee costs, however, the sender can manually set it higher to push a transaction quickly.
While the identities of the sender and the receiver remain unknown, the sender has an ETH wallet amounting to a massive $11 million, even after spending the $2.6 million in transaction fee.
Initially, many thought that it might be a mistake from the sender, however, the surprising thing is that today another similar transaction happened from the same address attaching a fee of 10,668 ether – worth $2.6 million – as transaction fees. This block was mined by the Etheremine pool.
Well, it is highly suspicious that the same sender pays $2.6 million as transaction fee two days consecutively. Strangely, the sender’s Ethereum wallet has been sending transactions every minute in the recent hours.
Well, with the same transaction happening twice in two days, there is a high suspicion that this is an attempt to launder money. Although the transaction fee goes straight to the miner, there is also enough possibility that the miners would also be working with the sender.
Note that Ethereum is a fully decentralized public blockchain network. Hence, one cannot revoke transactions or smart contracts happening on the platform. Also, there’s no way to reverse these transactions.
The interesting thing is that the wallet address that has sent the ETH tokens comes from a crypto exchange. In that case only the exchange can communicate with the mining pool to try to recover this massive transaction fee.
It will be interesting to see as to what happens ahead as more details of these transaction become public.