Cryptocurrency enthusiasts continue to be the target of hackers, sometimes at the risk of losing an astronomical amount of money. SOL Big Brain, collector of NFTs, recently paid the price, with no less than 1.5 million dollars which evaporated from his wallets. Still, some would say the scam couldn’t be easier to detect.
“Today is a bad day”. It would be hard to fault SOL Big Brain, an NFT collector – whose name turned out to be particularly ironic – who tweeted this sentence on Friday August 25th. Indeed, the investor was the victim of a scam which emptied a good part of his crypto wallet. The damage is considerable: around 1.5 million dollars, or 1.38 million euros in stablecoins, ether and GEAR token.
Scams are legion in the world of cryptocurrencies, but some are still more elaborate than others. As surprising as it may seem, the one who emptied the accounts of SOL Big Brain is not really one of the latter. Thus, it took the hacker to hack the Telegram account of the boss of a wallet management company to get his hands on his victim’s assets.
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A simple crypto scam cost its victim $1.5 million
“I received a message on Telegram from a portfolio management company asking me to claim my tokens”says SOL Big Brain, admitting in passing to have been ” lazy ” And “distracted”. It was probably this laziness that cost him dearly. Although the latter claims to have verified the identity of the sender of the message, present in several other group conversations, he did not realize that the latter had been hacked by a malicious individual.
Once his tokens were transferred, the investor realized his mistake. “The company did not specify that its founder had been hacked. The scammer used my real name, ETH address and copied the real vesting site. So everything was all planned”, he laments. Moral of the story: it’s pretty important to check that you’re sending your money to the right place, especially when it’s over a million euros.
Today is a bad day. Got lazy and got a DM on Telegram from a portfolio company telling me to claim my vested tokens. Was distracted but verified the guy sending the DM was the same one in multiple group chats. It was. Ends up he was hacked. No mention from the team that the… https://t.co/p790mCXRdt
— S◎L Big Brain (@SOLBigBrain) August 25, 2023