"unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 61 bytes" on latest Cookies Laravel

so as the title says I am getting an error in Laravel 5.5 in production

unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 61 bytes

This however has not been happening before. It started to happen a week ago.

When user (guest) clicks on a button an ajax request is sent to the server that creates a cookie for user, saves it to DB and saves it to users browser

If the user is not authenticated and his cookie is not yet created, this code executes.

$hash = randHash(20);

// Cookie is saved into DB

Cookie::queue('Posts', $hash, 45000);

And afterwards there is a middleware on server which executes on every request.

if($cookie = Cookie::get('Posts')){
   $cookie = Crypt::decrypt($cookie);

   // Rest of code
}

The problem is that a week ago, newest cookies became unable to be unserialized. After I inspected it closer I found out this:

I decrypted the cookie without unserializing it and instead of looking like this:

s:20:"Cookie";

it looked like this:

SomeRandomString|Cookie

and as you can see, the second option can not be deserialized. I honestly have no idea how to fix this.

Here are some things that I tried or saw:

• Clearing sessions and caches - Did not work
• key:generate - Unable to do this, since it is in production
• $serialize variable in EncryptCookies to false - I am working in Laravel 5.5

via Chebli Mohamed