I've never heard of someone successfully and unintentionally fat fingering a Bitcoin address typo to a valid Bitcoin address nobody owns. Fee box is a different thing, the recent $2.5m ETH headline you saw was not an accident but an attack/blackmail. Bitcoin core itself prevents you from using too high of a fee without an express override in the config.
>In short, the researchers claim that the hackers have gained access to an exchange’s funds. They are able to send money to certain whitelisted accounts that are marked as reliable in the exchange’s database to—but not to their own. So, they are sending the funds with excessively high transaction fees to sap the exchange’s accounts, and they’re demanding a ransom if it’s going to stop.
A 1 in 200 chance doesn't make much sense. In (legacy) addresses there's a 4 byte checksum done with sha256, so it should be something like a 1-in-4-billion (1 in 2^32) chance of a typo being valid. bech32 does something even smarter, but I'm not familiar with the details
