The retired artist Ed Suman lost more than $ 2 million in cryptocurrency earlier this year after being the victim of a scam involving someone who pretended to be a Coinbase support representative.
Suman, 67, has spent nearly two decades as a manufacturer in the art world, helping to build high -level works such as Jeff Koons’ Balloon dog Sculptures, according to a Bloomberg May 17 report.
After his retirement, he turned to investment in cryptocurrency, finally accumulating 17.5 Bitcoin (BTC) and 225 ether (ETH) – a portfolio which included most of his retirement savings.
He stored the funds in a Trezor Model One, a hardware portfolio commonly used by crypto holders to avoid the risk of exchange hacks. But in March, Suman received an SMS seeming to be from Coinbase, warning it of unauthorized access to accounts.
After responding, he received a phone call from a man identifying himself as a Coinbase security personnel named Brett Miller. The appellant seemed to be well informed, indicating correctly that Suman’s funds were stored in a material portfolio.
He then convinced Suman that his portfolio could always be vulnerable and traveled it a “security procedure” which involved entering his seed sentence in a website imitating the Coinbase interface.
Nine days later, a second appellant claiming to be Coinbase repeated the process. At the end of this call, all Sumpto’s crypto assets had disappeared.
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Coinbase undergoes a major data violation
The scam followed a data violation in Coinbase disclosed this week, in which the attackers welded customer support staff in India to access sensitive users.
Stolen data included customer names, account sales and transaction stories. Coinbase confirmed that the violation had an impact on approximately 1% of its monthly transaction users.
Among the people affected were the risk capital Roelof Botha, director partner at Sequoia Capital. Nothing indicates that his funds were accessible and that Botha refused to comment.
Coinbase security director Philip Martin said that contractual customer service agents at the center of the controversy were based in India and had been dismissed after the violation.
The scholarship also indicated that it planned to pay between $ 180 and $ 400 million in catering and reimbursement to affected users.
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