TronBank Fake Token Attack

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TronBank

Tron Bank is a smart contract which offers investors interest on tokens deposited. The smart contract hot wallet was vulnerable and a hacker was able to create a transaction involving fake tokens to steal the funds. There doesn't appear to be any mention of a recovery, so it's assumed affected users lost all their funds.

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

About TronBank

"TronBank - A financial game that runs entirely on Tron smart contract, with daily ROI 3.6%~6.6%. It's an open transparent contract that automatically generates revenue every second."

On April 11th, "the Tronbank team’s second game, BTTBank, was attacked by hackers with counterfeit money within 3 hours of the release and stole tens of millions of BTTs (not 180 million BTT)."

"BTT is a TRC-10 utility token based on the blockchain that powers features of the most popular decentralized protocols and applications in the world. DApps powered by BTT include BitTorrent Speed, BitTorrent File System, DLive, and others in the pipeline."

"Tron Dapp TronBank was attacked by Fake token attack at 1 am, about 170 million BTT were stolen in 1 hour (worth about 850,000 yuan). Monitoring showed that the hacker created a fake token BTTx to initiate the "invest" function to the contract, and the contract did not determine whether the sender's token id was consistent with the BTT real token id1002000."

This is a global/international case not involving a specific country.

The background of the exchange platform, service, or individuals involved, as it would have been seen or understood at the time of the events.

Include:

Known history of when and how the service was started.
What problems does the company or service claim to solve?
What marketing materials were used by the firm or business?
Audits performed, and excerpts that may have been included.
Business registration documents shown (fake or legitimate).
How were people recruited to participate?
Public warnings and announcements prior to the event.

Don't Include:

Any wording which directly states or implies that the business is/was illegitimate, or that a vulnerability existed.
Anything that wasn't reasonably knowable at the time of the event.

There could be more than one section here. If the same platform is involved with multiple incidents, then it can be linked to a main article page.

The Reality

This sections is included if a case involved deception or information that was unknown at the time. Examples include:

When the service was actually started (if different than the "official story").
Who actually ran a service and their own personal history.
How the service was structured behind the scenes. (For example, there was no "trading bot".)
Details of what audits reported and how vulnerabilities were missed during auditing.

What Happened

The specific events of the loss and how it came about. What actually happened to cause the loss and some of the events leading up to it.

Key Event Timeline - TronBank Fake Token Attack
Date	Event	Description
April 11th, 2019 12:00:00 AM	First Event	This is an expanded description of what happened and the impact. If multiple lines are necessary, add them here.

Total Amount Lost

The total amount lost is unknown.

How much was lost and how was it calculated? If there are conflicting reports, which are accurate and where does the discrepancy lie?

Immediate Reactions

How did the various parties involved (firm, platform, management, and/or affected individual(s)) deal with the events? Were services shut down? Were announcements made? Were groups formed?

Ultimate Outcome

What was the end result? Was any investigation done? Were any individuals prosecuted? Was there a lawsuit? Was any tracing done?

Total Amount Recovered

It is unknown how much was recovered.

What funds were recovered? What funds were reimbursed for those affected users?

Ongoing Developments

What parts of this case are still remaining to be concluded?

Prevention Policies

The safest storage for funds is offline multi-signature storage held by at least 3 of 4 known and trained individuals. The remaining hot wallet balance can be insured using a industry-based insurance fund, and would only be approved after review by two separate validation firms, which in the case of a smart contract would include an audit. Any one of these measures would have avoided the loss.