Scammers impersonating Coinbase representatives have recently stolen $1.7 million from a single user, with at least three other users reporting similar incidents in the past week. The crypto community is urged to exercise caution as these attacks grow in frequency and sophistication.
Tegan Kline, co-founder of Edge & Node, shared a distressing story on July 7 about a close friend who was tricked by a scammer posing as a Coinbase security team member. The scammer convinced the victim that their wallet was “connecting directly with the blockchain,” causing unauthorized transactions. They further validated their identity by sending a convincing email that appeared to be from Coinbase.
The victim was then directed to a website where they were asked to enter their seed phrase to stop the transactions. Although the victim knew this was risky, they entered a portion of the phrase, which was enough for the scammers to drain $1.7 million from their wallet within hours.
Hiro Systems CEO Alex Miller explained that such websites can capture data as it is entered, even if not submitted. This partial reveal of the seed phrase allowed the scammers to brute-force the rest. Miller also reported being targeted by a similar scam and suspects his information was leaked from CoinTracker’s email service provider database in 2022.
On July 3, a user named “TraderPaul04” recounted a similar scam attempt. An American male posing as a Coinbase employee called, claimed there was a login attempt from another city, and sent a fake password reset link. Sensing something was off, TraderPaul insisted on calling Coinbase directly, causing the scammer to hang up.
Another user, “beanx,” reported a comparable scam attempt on July 7, where a fake Coinbase representative claimed someone had tried to log into their account.
Coinbase has yet to respond to these incidents. The first half of 2024 saw $1.19 billion lost to crypto security breaches, with over $900 million stolen through phishing and seed phrase compromises. The crypto community is strongly advised to stay vigilant and verify any suspicious communications directly with official sources.
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