A $280 Million Bitcoin Heist Leads to Monero Price Rally
A crypto investor has misplaced greater than $282 million in Bitcoin and Litecoin after falling for a social engineering rip-off involving a {hardware} pockets.
On January 16, on-chain investigator ZachXBT revealed the huge theft, which reportedly drained the sufferer’s account of two.05 million Litecoin (LTC) and 1,459 Bitcoin (BTC).
Monero Spikes 36% After Hacker Swaps Stolen Crypto Into Privacy Coin
Cybersecurity agency ZeroShadow confirmed that the attacker executed the heist by impersonating Trezor buyer assist. Trezor is a significant {hardware} pockets supplier with over 2 million customers.
The impostors efficiently manipulated the sufferer into revealing their restoration seed phrase, successfully handing over full management of the property.
Following the breach, the perpetrator instantly started laundering the stolen funds.
ZachXBT reported that the attacker utilized a number of instantaneous exchanges, particularly Thorchain, to bridge the stolen Bitcoin into Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin.
Meanwhile, the attacker’s reliance on Thorchain has drawn sharp criticism towards the decentralized infrastructure supplier.
ZachXBT famous that this was not the primary time bad actors have leveraged the platform for such functions. This signifies that it stays a most popular vacation spot for criminals looking for to transfer stolen wealth.
Simultaneously, the hacker converted a significant portion of the loot into Monero (XMR), a privacy-focused token designed to obscure transaction particulars.
“ZeroShadow tracked the outbound flows and froze over $1M earlier than it may very well be swapped into XMR. The exercise that might get by is probably going growing XMR’s value,” Zero Shadow stated.
Notably, this aggressive shopping for spree triggered a significant price increase in the Monero market.
Data from BeinCrypto reveals the token surged greater than 36% over the seven-day interval, reaching a peak of almost $800. The asset has since corrected to roughly $621 as of press time.
This incident underscores a widening safety disaster throughout the digital asset sector. Attackers are shifting ways, prioritizing social engineering and brand impersonation scams over technical code exploits to deceive victims.
Blockchain analytics agency Chainalysis quantified the development, reporting a 1,400% year-over-year surge in impersonation scams. The agency additionally stated the common monetary loss per incident has elevated by greater than 600%.
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