Crypto trader gets sandwich attacked in stablecoin swap, loses $215K

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A crypto trader fell victim to a sandwich attack while making a $220,764 stablecoin transfer on March 12 — losing almost 98% of its value to a Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) bot.

$220,764 worth of the USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin was swapped to $5,271 of Tether (USDT) in eight seconds as the MEV bot successfully front-ran the transaction, banking over $215,500.

Data from Ethereum ( $2,303.85 ) block explorer shows the MEV attack occurred on decentralized exchange Uniswap ( $3.21 ) v3’s USDC-USDT liquidity pool, where $19.8 million worth of value is locked.

*Details of the sandwich attack transaction. Source:* *Etherscan*

The MEV bot front-ran the transaction by swapping all the USDC liquidity out of the Uniswap ( $3.21 ) v3 USDC-USDT pool and then put it back in after the transaction was executed, according to founder of The DeFi Report Michael Nadeau.

The attacker tipped Ethereum ( $2,303.85 ) block builder “bob-the-builder.eth” $200,000 from the $220,764 swap and profited $8,000 themselves, Nadeau said.

DeFi researcher “DeFiac” speculates the same trader using different wallets has fallen victim to a total of six sandwich attacks, citing “internal tools.” They pointed out that all funds traveled from borrowing and lending protocol Aave before being deposited on Uniswap ( $3.21 ) .

Two of the wallets fell victim to an MEV bot sandwich attack on March 12 at around 9:00 am UTC. Ethereum ( $2,303.85 ) wallet addresses “0xDDe…42a6D” and “0x999…1D215” were sandwich attacked for $138,838 and $128,003 in transactions that occurred three to four minutes earlier.

Both transactors made the same swap in the Uniswap ( $3.21 ) v3 liquidity pool as the trader who made the $220,762 transfer.

Others speculate the trades could be attempts at money laundering.

“If you have NK illicit funds you could construct a very mev-able tx, then privately send it to a mev bot and have them arb it in a bundle,” said founder of crypto data dashboard DefiLlama, 0xngmi.

“That way you wash all the money with close to 0 losses.”

While initially criticizing Uniswap ( $3.21 ) , Nadeau later acknowledged that the transactions didn’t come from Uniswap ( $3.21 ) ’s front end, which has MEV protection and default slippage settings.

Nadeau backtracked on those criticisms after Uniswap ( $3.21 ) CEO Hayden Adams and others clarified the protections Uniswap ( $3.21 ) has in place to fight against sandwich attacks.