Mistake or Money Laundering Scheme? Someone Paid $450,000 in Fees to Send 0.1 ETH

Crypto enthusiasts are puzzled about a few mysterious transactions, discovered on Feb. 19, 2019, which over four transactions spent $450,000 in gas to transfer less than 0.15 ETH. In the first transaction, the user sent 0.01 ETH, which is just under $1.50, and paid a transaction fee of over $30,000.

The second and third transactions incurred fees of $120,000 and $60,000.

The most outrageous transaction fee was 2100 ETH for transferring 0.1 ETH. At current ether prices, this amounts to over $300,000 for a single transaction fee for moving a mere $15.00.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts were perplexed by the transactions, prompting many to analyze the transactions to the very last detail.

At first, many dismissed the transaction fees as a user error, which is not uncommon.

Enthusiasts pointed out that the wallet holder could have easily swapped the transaction fee with the amount they wanted to send, a common mistake that has caused many crypto holders to lose amounts of money.

What's strange about the transactions is not only has the wallet sent a huge number of transactions-at over 19,000-but also that these transactions with high gas fees were sent in sequence.

Saturn Network, a decentralized exchange startup, pointed out that if a transaction isn't publicly broadcast it could have been mined by a user who was complicit in the scheme.

Worth mentioning is that some also pointed out that the wallet holder and the miner could be the same person, as a miner could have broadcasted the transaction to himself until he found the nonce of the next block.

Such a method for money laundering, enthusiasts speculate, is more desirable because it obfuscates even more information about a transaction than a typical ETH transfer.