Your wallet may show a dollar balance for fake USDT that you cannot sell

Fake USDT tokens could display convincing dollar balances in cryptocurrency wallets while their holders remained unable to sell them through the markets showing those prices, according to a Nov. 10 investigation by blockchain security firm Forta. The researchers identified 32 tokens whose prices were maintained in successive periods by wallets repeatedly trading through restricted pools.

When Forta simulated an outside wallet attempting to sell at the midpoint of each pool's active window, all 32 rejected the swap. This created a gap between the dollar value a wallet could display and the value an ordinary holder could actually obtain through the identified market.

Price Manipulation Through Restricted Pools

Forta traced the pricing mechanism to PancakeSwap Infinity pools pairing counterfeit tokens with real USDT. Automated wallets, which the researchers call keepers, repeatedly made small round-trip trades to keep the latest pool price near a dollar.

The pools' swap hooks restricted trading to wallets on the operators' allowlists, allowing keepers to maintain quotations while excluding outside holders. Forta measured median prices between $0.99 and $1.005 across the 32 tokens, with the rotation beginning Feb. 19 and continuing through at least Nov. 3.

Real-World Impact and Deception

One seller who contacted Forta described exchanging online-game items for a four-figure payment they believed was USDT on BNB Chain. Their wallet showed Tether's branding and a matching dollar balance, but they discovered the token was counterfeit after sending it to an exchange and receiving no credit.

Forta traced the payment to four ordinary token Transfer events and linked the payer to a 13-wallet crew. In one observed purchase, $5 bought 215,786 counterfeit tokens, illustrating how the displayed amount bears little relationship to what the payer spent.

Broader Ecosystem of Counterfeits

The 32 price-maintained tokens represented only a subset of a much wider ecosystem. Forta identified at least 151 lookalike assets, including 115 dollar copies and copies of BTC, BNB and ETH, with 3,138,110 direct transfers recorded through Nov. 3.

Forta's count for one older BTC copy extends only through July 2025, making the transfer total a lower bound. The researchers identified 266,497 recipient addresses that met a heuristic including receipts of 20 to 20,000 fake dollars from senders with fewer than 100 recipients.

Binance's Sept. 24 warning about fake-payment scams described similar counterfeit tokens with familiar names, logos, and misleading wallet values. Forta recommends checking the token contract and screening names for visually confusable characters before accepting any cryptocurrency payment.