Recently, I saw people discussing that 3 million USDT mis-transfer incident again. To be honest, stories like this happen every year—only the victims change.

Some people blame it on “family member mishandling,” others say it was a “slip of the hand.” But if you truly understand how crypto wallets work, you’ll realize: the moment a seed phrase appears in a WeChat chat record, the game is already over.

A lot of people don’t really understand what a seed phrase is. It’s not just an ordinary “password”—it’s more like a master key to your entire digital vault. With the seed phrase, you can derive all the private keys of the wallet. Once a hacker gets hold of it, they can empty your assets in minutes, even erase transaction traces.

The actions in that case were a textbook example of what not to do: storing the seed phrase in WeChat, then copying and pasting it on an old Android phone. That’s like paving a superhighway for attackers—WeChat message cloud backups, old device system vulnerabilities, public WiFi monitoring your clipboard... Hackers don’t even need sophisticated techniques; a simple listener script can intercept your sensitive information in real time.

My advice is simple: if you’re still saving your seed phrase as a screenshot, or sending it via any social app, that’s basically the same as writing your bank card PIN on a telephone pole in public. Even your most trusted family members should not let the seed phrase touch any internet-connected device. Engrave it offline on a metal plate, then lock it in a bank vault—that’s where it truly belongs.

In the case described, the wife was operating on a device that was still connected to an unknown...

(To be continued, but the core logic is already clear: convenience and security are always at odds in the crypto world.)