Fraudsters pretending to be Coinbase steal $1.7M from users amid multiple attacks
At least three Coinbase users and one crypto user reported being targeted by Coinbase-impersonated scammers last week, with one victim defrauded of $1.7 million.
Edge & Node co-founder Tegan Klein shared it with X on July 7 after a teller from a “good friend” tricked a scammer into sharing their seed phrase with $1.7 million a day earlier.
The victim was sent an email that appeared to be from Coinbase, where the scammer called the security team from Coinbase and confirmed that they had “spoken with an official representative at Coinbase.”
The fraudster claims that the victim's wallet “interfaces directly with the blockchain” and allows transactions to be sent out of the wallet. The scammer then sent another email, which appeared to be from Coinbase and showed an outgoing transaction.
The scammer directs the victim to a website to enter their genealogy to stop the transaction, the victim knowing it is “not secure” but entering “partial” of their phrase without handing over anything.
Hours later, $1.7 million was taken out of the wallet, they said.
Alex Miller, CEO of Hero Systems, wrote that such websites are “holding the data” even without logging in, and that the victim's partial disclosure of their genealogy may be enough “for the bad guys.” [to] “The rest of the brute force.”
Miller shared that he was also recently contacted by a fraudster who pretended to come from Coinbase using the same scam. He believes his data may have been leaked from CoinTracker's email service provider database in 2022.
“They were using the Coinbase API key that connects to CoinTracker to verify that it's me specifically (among other information),” he said. “If you're using CoinTracker, at least cycle your API keys,” Miller advised.
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On July 3, X user “TraderPaul04” called a fake Coinbase representative who he called “pretty sophisticated,” claiming that there was an attempt to log into their account from another city.
According to TraderPaul, “an American male claiming to be a Coinbase employee” provided their full name, verified their email claiming to have temporarily locked their Coinbase account and sent a fake password reset link with the intention of capturing their account password.
TraderPaul wasn't convinced and insisted on calling Coinbase customer service directly, saying he “hung up” after failing to convince the scammer.
In the year On July 7, X user “binx” posted a similar scam call with a fake Coinbase representative saying “someone tried to log into my Coinbase.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Coinbase for comment, but did not receive an immediate response.
In the first half of 2024, nearly $1.19 billion was lost to crypto security issues, with more than $900 million lost to phishing and phishing attacks.
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