On March 12, during a crypto trader’s transaction worth $220,764 in stablecoins, they fell victim to a sandwich attack, losing nearly 98% of their assets to an MEV bot. Within just 8 seconds, $220,764 of USDC was converted to $5,271 USDT as the MEV bot successfully front-ran the transaction, profiting over $215,500. This attack took place in the USDC-USDT liquidity pool on Uniswap v3, which has $19.8 million locked value. The MEV bot emptied the entire USDC liquidity from the pool, front-ran the transaction, then immediately returned the liquidity to the pool. The attacker paid $200,000 as a bribe to an Ethereum block producer with the address bob-the-builder.eth and pocketed a net profit of $8,000. Additionally, two wallets with addresses 0xDDe…42a6D and 0x999…1D215 also fell victim to similar attacks on March 12, losing a total of $138,838 and $128,003 respectively. Some analysts speculate these transactions may have been money laundering attempts. The founder of DefiLlama platform, 0xngmi, suggests that if you have illicit assets, you can design a transaction tailored for MEV, privately send it to the bot for arbitrage in a batch transaction, effectively laundering money hassle-free.
