High-Profile Whale Loses Over $24M in Crypto Phishing Attack: Report

Fraudsters don’t often succeed in swindling cryptocurrency whales with substantial market-influencing holdings. Nevertheless, in an unfortunate twist of events, a crypto investor recently incurred multimillion-dollar losses in the latest phishing scam.

The theft is now regarded as one of the most significant crypto phishing attacks in recent history.

• According to on-chain data, a prominent crypto whale with the address “0x13e382” suffered a significant loss of $24.23 million in liquid-staked Ethereum on September 6. This loss included 4,851 rETH worth around $8.58 million and 9,579 stETH valued at $15.63 million, all of which fell into the hands of phishing scammers.
• After further investigation, the Web3 security firm Scam Sniffer disclosed that the whale unintentionally granted token approval to the fraudsters by authorizing “increaseAllowance” transactions.
• The pilfered funds were initially deposited into two addresses, specifically “0x693b72” and “0x4c10a4.” However, the scammers have since transferred a portion of these assets to the Fixed Float exchange, while the rest now resides in three separate addresses.
• One of the wallets tied to this fraudulent activity, specifically “0x4c10a4,” is linked to multiple crypto phishing websites.
• The victim reportedly has extensive on-chain experience and serves as a significant liquidity provider. They offer WBTC/USDT liquidity exceeding $1.6 million on Uniswap V3 and have been engaged with ious protocols, including Aave, 1inch, Curve, OMG, EOS, and more.
• The identity remains undisclosed, but the earliest recorded transaction linked to this address dates back to June 2017, originating from Bitfinex.
• The development comes amidst rising crypto phishing scams swirling by countless verified paid bots utilizing X (formerly Twitter), especially after the rollout of the new Twitter Blue subion last November.
• Last month, prominent on-chain sleuth ZackXBT also pointed out the alarming growth of phishing scam spam from fake verified organizations on the social media platform.