"Charlotte Fang", the leader of the controversial Remilia project (known for its Milady NFTs), claimed he was hacked and drained of ETH and NFTs potentially worth several million dollars. Although the project's treasury used a multi-signature model, the private keys were stored in one password manager, which Fang says was compromised.
The attacker stole around 490 ETH (~$1.8 million) and $58,000 USDC, along with more than 130 Milady NFTs, 320 Remilio NFTs, and hundreds of derivative tokens issued on the NFTX platform. Based on floor prices, the assets are valued at north of $6 million.
The mechanism of the attack is still uncertain, though Fang has said he suspects malware that could have intercepted credentials to his Bitwarden password manager. Some have expressed skepticism around the "hack", suggesting it could have been inside job. The Remilia group had suffered a separate $1 million loss in September 2023 — blamed on a rogue developer — and failed to implement many security safeguards after that incident.
A Binance-incubated platform called NFPrompt claims to be "the first Prompt Artist Platform in Web3" — with "prompt artist" referring to people who come up with prompts to feed into large language models. More succinctly, it's a platform to sell the NFTs you've made out of AI-generated images.
The platform announced on March 15 that it had suffered a "critical security incident" that it attributed to "a group of hackers" who were able to gain access to funds belonging both to the project's users and the project itself. They did not disclose how much was taken.
The project announced that it was working with the FBI, and had contacted centralized exchanges to ask them to freeze stolen funds.
Someone accidentally threw away $1.36 million when they accidentally sent Tethers to the Tether contract address — making them permanently inaccessible in a process known as "burning". This is a rather common phenomenon in crypto, where it's easy to accidentally copy/paste the wrong address.
Most experienced crypto users have adopted the habit of sending small test transactions before transferring large amounts of tokens, to first check that they're using the correct address. Oddly, this person did so in this case, but then went right ahead and transferred the remaining tokens to the erroneous address.
The person may have lucked out that they were using a centralized stablecoin like Tether, whose operators hold a substantial amount of control over freezing, destroying, and creating new Tethers — and could feasibly replace the burned tokens.
The "AI-optimized" defi project Mozaic Fi was exploited by an attacker who drained around $2 million in funds from the project.
According to MozaicFi, the theft had been perpetrated by a rogue developer who was able to gain access to a private key held by a core team member. They also claimed that a simultaneous large sale of the Mozaic token resulted in cascading liquidations.
In good news for the project, the attacker moved around 90% of the stolen funds to MEXC, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange that was able to freeze the thief's access to the funds.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Massachusetts announced that they had filed a civil forfeiture action to seize cryptocurrency priced at around $2.3 million from two Binance accounts. Those accounts had received cryptocurrency of various kinds from at least 37 American victims, one of whom was based in Massachusetts and who lost $400,000 in crypto assets to the scammers.
An Ethereum holder who had been staking their ETH through a liquid restaking protocol called Ether.fi suffered a 501 ETH (~$2.025 million) loss when they fell victim to a phishing scam. They inadvertently signed a malicious transaction that granted the attacker "increase allowance" permissions, enabling them to siphon almost the entire sum of funds from the wallet. The individual was left with less than $1,500 in the wallet.
Since March 5, those who used the Incognito Market darkweb narcotics marketplace have found themselves unable to withdraw the Bitcoin and Monero they had on the platform. It appeared the platform had exit scammed for somewhere between $10 and $30 million.
Making matters worse, on March 10 the website posted a message reading, "Yes, this is an extortion !!" They wrote that, although the platform promised to "auto-encrypt" messages between buyers and sellers, and auto-delete after an expiry date, messages were not encrypted or deleted. They demanded that users pay an additional $100 to $20,000 to have their information removed from the dataset, which they promised to release at the end of May. "Whether or not you and your customers' info is on that list is totally up to you."
The tactic is reminiscent of that of ransomware groups, which often demand double fees: one from victims of hacks first to regain access to their systems, and another in exchange for a promise to destroy stolen data.
Web3: a technology so promising you can't even pay a company $100 million to use it.
Crowdfunding website Kickstarter surprised and dismayed many of its users in December 2021 when they announced they would be moving the product to the blockchain in December 2021 for... reasons. That blockchain would just so happen to be the relatively unknown Andreessen Horowitz-backed Celo blockchain. "How this will actually work, beyond Kickstarter being able to yell 'blockchain' like a spell to summon investors ... is unclear," wrote Tom McKay at Gizmodo.
He probably didn't realize how right he was, but now it's been revealed that KickStarter was able to land a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz with handwavy proclamations about the blockchain that its own COO didn't seem to quite understand.
The company seems to have since given up on its blockchain ambitions — in no small part thanks to user revolt. It seems that $100 million windfall didn't include any terms actually requiring Kickstarter to follow through.
Scam Sniffer's February 2024 report describes 57,000 victims who collectively lost almost $47 million thanks to various phishing schemes on the Twitter platform. Many of the losses came from accounts designed to impersonate various popular cryptocurrency projects, who diverted users to scam websites resembling the real ones.
The largest individual loss was the phishing attack against kirilm.eth, who had over 180 million $BEAM tokens notionally worth over $5 million drained from their crypto wallet. The attacker sold the tokens for around $4.5 million.
The total amount stolen is down slightly from January, in which $55 million was taken. Altogether, scammers have stolen over $100 million via Twitter phishing alone in the first two months of 2024.
A investment firm called Crypto4Winners announced in their Telegram channel that "Our investigations lead us to suspect an individual of committing fraudulent acts that may have compromised the integrity of assets. It is also possible that the current and historical data at our disposal has been tampered with, with a high degree of sophistication."
The company had paused withdrawals the previous day, and has not re-enabled them. They also have not disclosed the amount that was allegedly stolen.
Crypto4Winners claims it has earned 377% returns on customer investments since 2019, producing 3–20% monthly returns.
The company is co-owned by Luc Schiltz, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017 for defrauding victims of over $1.5 million through various investment frauds. He was released after two years, and quickly started the Crypto4Winners project after.
The Unizen defi platform lost around $2.1 million in the Tether stablecoin in an attack that took advantage of a vulnerability an external call from the project smart contract.
The project team sent on-chain messages to the attacker, offering a 20% "bounty" for the return of the remaining funds.
An attacker was able to use a flash loan attack to manipulate an oracle on the WooFi DEX implementation on the Arbitrum network. By manipulating the price of $WOO, they were able to steal around $8.5 million.
Blockchain security firms detected the attack quickly, and the project team paused the project's smart contract within fifteen minutes, but not before the millions were stolen. They contacted the attacker via an on-chain message to offer a 10% "bounty", later threatening that they had a "strong lead that we think will soon reveal the identity of the exploiter".
Someone who held over 111.6 million ALI tokens from a project called The AI Protocol was phished by someone using a wallet drainer service using a permit phishing technique. The tokens were priced at around $4.3 million.
Blockchain sleuth zachxbt was able to coordinate with the project to organize a community governance vote to burn the stolen tokens before the attacker was able to cash out. Although this doesn't return the stolen funds to their original owner, it at least keeps the attacker from profiting.
The Shido blockchain suffered an exploit of their staking smart contract, in which an attacker was able to transfer ownership of the contract to another address and then upgrade the contract with a function that allowed them to withdraw staked tokens. Altogether, the attacker withdrew all 4.3 billion staked $SHIDO tokens — over half the entire circulating supply.
Although the stolen tokens were nominally priced at $35 million, the massive theft caused the price to plummet 94%. The attacker has converted the stolen tokens to around 956 ETH ($3.3 million).
The Shido team announced that they would be trying to offer a "bounty" to the hacker.
A bug in Seneca Protocol's smart contract has allowed attackers to steal funds from users who had approved the contract. So far, around $3 million has been stolen across the Ethereum blockchain and Arbitrum layer-2.
Making things worse, although the project's smart contract inherits the Pausable
module that should allow the Seneca team to halt the malfunctioning code, they never implemented the function, meaning there's no way for them to stop the thefts. Instead, individual users must each revoke access to the flawed contract.
Serenity Shield, a project aiming to solve "crypto inheritence", has been hacked. Although the project prominently claims to help "ensur[e] your financial and personal security", they seem to have some trouble ensuring their own.
An attacker stole 6.9 SERSH tokens from a MetaMask wallet belonging to the project. Although the tokens were ostensibly priced at $5.6 million, the thief was only able to sell them for around $586,000.
Serenity Shield confirmed the breach, and encouraged people to stop trading $SERSH as they planned to relaunch the token. "Rest assured, we are deploying all necessary safety measures to ensure a foolproof system," they wrote. This time it will be secure, they promise.
The team also sent a message to the hacker, offering a 15% "bounty" and a promise not to pursue legal action in exchange for the return of the stolen funds.
According to crypto sleuth zachxbt, the attack seems to be linked to exploits of OKX (December 2023) and Concentric (January 2024).
There are evidently no lows to which crypto scammers will not sink.
Some scammers were able to compromise the Twitter account belonging to the Friends star Matthew Perry, who passed away in October 2023. He had spent much of his life battling addiction, and his death was drug-related.
The scammers took advantage of this to share crypto addresses that they claimed would funnel donations to the real Matthew Perry Foundation, which actually tries to help those battling addiction. However, in a post on Perry's other social media accounts, the Foundation clarified that they had nothing to do with the wallets or the Twitter posts, and described the website as "fraudulent".
This crypto skeptic I've heard of once said "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
A project called tea.xyz promised people they could "get rewards for [their] open-source contributions", complete with a flashy website describing how it would "enhance the sustainability of open-source software".
So far, it's achieved the exact opposite. Promising to reward open source contributors with crypto tokens, the project asked users to verify their access to open source projects by merging in a YAML file containing their crypto wallet address. This kicked off a flood of pull requests to prominent, often non-crypto-related open source projects by people who had never contributed to the project (or, often, any open source project), but who wished to merge in a file describing them as a "code owner".
Particularly impacted by this project was the open source blogging platform Ghost, which was used as an example in the demo video released by tea.xyz, and which received several PRs of this kind. A somewhat flummoxed maintainer of the repository replied to one PR: "[I]n practice the TEA project is not helping to support the Ghost project, but is instead causing a rush of self-serving PRs to be submitted to cash-in on other people's work. ... This why people hate on crypto." A maintainer of another unrelated open source project called "ghost" also reported receiving an influx of spam PRs.
This is not the first time crypto has generated massive Github spam, although another recent incident was (blessedly) mostly limited to open-source crypto projects and didn't waste the time of non-crypto-related projects as this one has.
MicroStrategy, the company founded and chaired by Bitcoin maximalist Michael Saylor, suffered a Twitter account compromise on February 26. Although MicroStrategy ostensibly develops software, it's better known for its massive Bitcoin holdings, driven by Saylor.
Although Saylor has been publicly critical of Ethereum, that didn't seem to raise flags among those eager to receive an airdrop of the Ethereum-based "MSTR" token that the company's Twitter account claimed they had just launched. Those who fell for the phishing link were redirected to a website that spoofed the real MicroStrategy website, with malicious code that drained funds.
Around $440,000 was stolen thanks to the fake announcement, with the majority of it coming from one wallet that was drained of a variety of tokens notionally worth around $425,000.
The user experience in crypto is apparently so bad that platforms can't even keep their own tokens straight. A web3 messaging project, Dechat, announced with some fanfare that the Dechat token would begin trading. In their social media post, however, they erroneously linked to the wrong token on the PancakeSwap cryptocurrency exchange. Instead of linking to the token they had developed, they included a link to a honeypot: that is, a malicious smart contract that aims to entice people to deposit funds that can then be stolen.
"You clowns literally linked a honeypot for your own token launch," wrote crypto sleuth zachxbt. Some users replied that they had lost money to the erroneous link.
Dechat quickly removed the post and created a new one with a corrected link. They also promised to reimburse users who had lost money to the honeypot.