Artist Loses Nearly $2 Million in Coinbase Leak
Former Los Angeles-based artist Ed Suman, who worked on famous sculptures including Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog series, lost more than $2 million in his cryptocurrency retirement savings amid a Coinbase data leak, Bloomberg reported.
Suman started investing in cryptocurrencies in 2017. Over the years, he has accumulated savings for retirement: 17.5 BTC and 225 ETH — $2.4 million at the time of writing.
He lost his savings as a result of a fraud related to the leak of data of users of the crypto exchange Coinbase, which the company officially reported last week.
According to Coinbase, hackers began accessing customers’ personal data as early as January. They bribed customer service representatives in India to obtain names, addresses, account balances, and transaction histories. With this information, the attackers launched social engineering attacks like the one they used on Suman.
According to the publication, on March 8, the man received a text message that appeared to be from Coinbase, warning him of suspicious account logins. After responding to the message, he received a call from a supposed security representative named Brett Miller.
The media noted that the scammer knew that Suman stored his cryptocurrencies on a Trezor Model One hardware wallet, a cold storage device. The attacker convinced him that hackers could still access the wallet, even without an internet connection, and offered to “eliminate the threat.” To do this, Suman had to enter a seed phrase – a special access code – on a website that turned out to be fake.
Nine days later, the scammers called again under the guise of technical support and repeated the manipulation. After that, all assets disappeared.
“The attack becomes much more effective when the attacker has personal information: balances, account history. If you have personal data, it's a whole other level of fraud. They approach you with information that looks legitimate,” said John Wingate, CEO of digital asset security firm Bank Social.
In a statement about the incident, Coinbase promised to compensate customers who fell victim to the scam. However, Ed Suman says he has not received any confirmation that his case will be compensated.
“Coinbase should have implemented fraud awareness measures months ago. The most effective thing they could have done is send an email to all customers warning them about scammers pretending to be support. They could have prevented a huge number of thefts. In my opinion, their inaction was egregious – and in my case, it was disastrous,” he said.
Coinbase declined to comment on Suman's claims. The company said less than 1% of its monthly active users were affected by the breach.
Other victims include Sequoia Capital managing partner and member of the so-called “PayPal mafia” (which includes Peter Thiel and Elon Musk) Roelof Botha. There is no confirmation yet that his account was hacked.
Источник: cryptocurrency.tech
