QUADRIGA INITIATIVE
CRYPTO WATCHDOG & FRAUD RECOVERY PLATFORM
A COMMUNITY-BASED, NOT-FOR-PROFIT
$1 000 000 USD
JULY 2020
GLOBAL
TREZOR
DESCRIPTION OF EVENTS
"The safe place for your coins." "Store your coins with Trezor." "Hardware wallet is the safest way to manage & trade your cryptocurrencies."
"There are also other instances of people losing their cryptocurrency as a result of entering their seed phrases, with a scam from November resulting in over 1.1 million XRP being stolen from Ledger users. In this case, Ledgers users were sent phishing emails that directed them to a fake Ledger website, on which they were invited to enter their seed phrase. Something similar happened to Trezor users in July."
"All my crypto was stolen from my Trezor wallet after I updated to the new software. Make sure it's a legit Trezor site."
"I did contact Chainanlysis and the FBI and they found out that I visited a fishing site from Google. I did googled Trezor Bridge to find the latest update, thats when I clicked into the fake Trezor website. Everything looks the same as the legit Trezor.io website, except the popup saying there is a need to recover the wallet due to a bad connection."
"I have my Trezor wallet with my seed phrase in my apt. and I must of not being careful to protect the 24 phrases. They took everything except the Zcash and I can't move the Zcash from my Trezor. I have the address it was moved to. I checked on Blockchain explorer."
"[T]hey have somehow got access to my 24 seed phrases. That's the only thing I can think of. They took first the Bitcoins one day then an other day they took ETH and just recently during June they took LTC."
"It turns out that the hacker took more than $1 million dollars in total from various users."
A user was searching Google for the official Trezor website. A fake Trezor website showed up in the search results, which is something which typically happens due to purchasing advertising. This took the user to a fake website that claimed their device was disconnected and prompted them to enter their seed phrase. Once entered, the hacker used it to empty their wallet of funds. In total, it's reported that $1m were stolen from various users by this same thief.
HOW COULD THIS HAVE BEEN PREVENTED?
There is no reason to ever enter a seed phrase into an application. All hardware wallets on the market establish that any phrase should be entered into the hardware wallet hardware itself.
Always check and visit the official website of a service. The majority of funds should be stored offline and not on a live wallet application. When setting up a new wallet or upgrading wallet software, never enter your pass phrase or send any funds without first transferring a smaller amount.
Fake Trezor App Steals $600k in BTC, Time to Rethink Crypto Security? (Feb 25)
https://trezor.io/ (Feb 20)
https://trezor.io/security/ (Feb 20)
Fake Trezor iPhone App Scams User Out of $600,000 in Bitcoin - Decrypt (Feb 13)
He downloaded the Trezor app on iOS. It was a scam and stole $1 million in bitcoin. - The Washington Post (Feb 20)
@reedalbergotti Twitter (Feb 27)
Man loses BTC worth $1M to fake Trezor app - CoinGeek (Feb 27)
Fake Trezor app steals more than $1 million worth of crypto coins | Malwarebytes Labs (Feb 27)
Crypto Scams Hit Apple’s App Store, User’s Life Savings Wiped Out – Cryptovibes.com – Daily Cryptocurrency and FX News (Feb 27)
Bitcoin User Loses Over 17 BTC Through Fake Mobile App – Techpadi (Feb 27)
