In the world of cryptocurrency, attacks on user wallets are slowly becoming routine. Yet sometimes an attack comes along that surprises everyone – and this time was one of them.
According to Cointelegraph, the attack took place on January 10 at around 11:00 p.m. UTC. The victim was an anonymous owner of a Trezor cryptocurrency wallet (a secure gadget for storing crypto, a bit like a USB stick protected by a password).
The scammers used a method called social engineering – a clever kind of fraud in which the attacker poses as a trusted person to extract secret information.
How the attack unfolded:
- The fraudster posed as Trezor’s technical support. They likely contacted the victim by email, chat or phone, pretending to help solve a problem with the crypto wallet.
- They convinced the victim to share the „seed phrase” (a special string of 12 or 24 words that acts like the key to the entire crypto wallet).
- Once the scammer gained access to the wallet, they immediately took control of it.
- They quickly transferred huge sums: 1,459 bitcoins (worth about $139 million) and over 2 million litecoins ($153 million). Together, that is more than $282 million.
- To cover their tracks, the funds were moved across various blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Ripple (XRP) and Litecoin, using transaction anonymization tools. Most of it was then transferred to Monero, which offers very strong transaction privacy and is difficult to trace.
The attack was met with a response from ZeroShadow, a firm that monitors blockchain activity. Within just 20 minutes, they froze around $700,000 of the stolen funds. Unfortunately, by that time the thieves had already managed to move most of the cryptocurrency into the highly anonymous Monero.
Source: Cointelegraph.com
