$500,000 stolen by a phishing attacker was taken away by an MEV bot for $0.03, seizing $370,000

According to GoPlus monitoring, a user on the Base chain lost 500,000 USDC due to a phishing attack. When the attacker exchanged the stolen funds for WETH, the script did not set slippage protection, routing to a Uniswap V4 WETH/USDC pool with almost no liquidity, resulting in only 67.9 ETH (worth $129,000) being exchanged for 500,000 USDC, of which $370,000 was earned by an MEV bot.

The MEV bot only paid 0.03 USDC to front-run the transaction but incurred 3.5 ETH in gas fees for this. Subsequently, the victim sent an on-chain message to the attacker and the MEV address, stating that they had identified the attacker and were willing to pay a 10% bounty for a refund.