Imagine waking up one fine morning and realizing that some sly hacker just swiped $55 million worth of your hard-earned crypto. Does it sound like a nightmare? Well, that is precisely what happened to one unfortunate crypto ‘whale’— and yes before you ask, Whale is what we call someone who holds a massive amount of cryptocurrency.
The whale committed the simple but very pricey error on August 20. They signed off on a transaction without checking it again, and pouf! There goes $55.47 million in DAI, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar, vanished just like that from their wallet.
The attackers didn’t waste time either. In a quickie, they transferred the swag, reflecting the stolen funds to a fresh, shiny new address they had set up, thereby rendering the whale high and dry.
By the time our whale realized what was happening and tried to move the funds to safety, it was already game over. The attackers locked the door behind them and left with the money.
These were smooth cybercriminals. They had nearly half of the purloined DAI—some $27.5 million—converted to 10,625 Ether (ETH).
That is somewhat like taking your stolen cash and trading it for gold before anybody even knows it’s gone.
A blockchain analytics firm called Lookonchain caught this dubious activity right away and fired off a warning to the entire crypto community: Don’t just go around signing transactions all willy-nilly!
It looks like it’s one of those scams that happens almost periodically in the crypto world. The scamming is all about trickery—getting people to click on dodgy links, download fake apps, or as in this case, sign off on shady transactions.
Once they have what they need, they can snatch up your digital assets faster than you can say “blockchain.” And 2024 isn’t looking good—nearly half a billion dollars have already been lost to these scams this year alone.
Ronghu Gu is co-founder of blockchain security firm CertiK and he is shouting loud from the rooftops about better security measures.
Things like multifactor authentication and security keys are your best friends against this high-stakes game.
Phishing Scams are Global Problem right now
Even scarier is that this is not an isolated incident. Phishing scams are cropping up all over the globe.
Just this August, the Australian Federal Police started investigating phishing scams that have drained the wallets of about 2,000 Aussies.
It isn’t your run-of-the-mill scams, either. They’re using “approval phishing” tactics, which basically trick people to give hackers the green light to rob them blind.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission doesn’t sit back either.
Since July 2023, they have taken down over 5,530 fake investment platforms, alongside 1,065 phishing links, and 615 crypto scams.
What You Need to Know
What is the moral of the story? In the game of cryptocurrency, you have to keep your eyes open.
The digital world can be a minefield at times, and you need only one wrong click—the worst of all—with the consequences that might cost you everything.
Double-check every transaction, especially if they seem a little off.
A couple of seconds more worth of caution could be what keeps your crypto safe and what gets it whisked off to the digital abyss.
