The retired artist Ed Suman lost at $ 2 million in cryptocurrencies earlier this year after being a victim of a scam that involves someone who passes through a coinbase support representative.
They add 67, spent almost two decades as a manufacturer in the art world, helping to build high profile works such as Jeff Koons’ Balloon dog Sculptures, according to a Bloomberg May 17 report.
After retiring, Hey turned to the investment of cryptocurrencies, possible accumulating 17.5 Bitcoin (BTC) and 225 Ether (ETH), a portfolio that comprised his retirement savings.
Take the funds in a Trezor model, a hardware wallet commonly used by cryptography holders to avoid the risks of exchange hacks. But in March, Summan received a text message that appealed to be coinbase, warning him or access to the unauthorized account.
After the answer, he received a phone call from a man who identified himself as a coinbase security personnel called Brett Miller. The person called Knowledgey appeared, correctly stating that Summan’s funds were stored in a hardware wallet.
He then convinced that his wallet could still be vulnerable and accompanied him through a “security procedure” that involved entertaining his seed phrase on a website that imitated the coinbase interface.
Nine days later, a second person who calls to be Coinbase repeated the process. At the end of that call, all the Cryptography holdings of Summan were gone.
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Coinbase suffers significant data violation
The scam followed a violation of data in Coinbase released this week, in which the attackers bribed to the customer service in India to access the user’s confidential information.
The stolen data included customer names, account balances and transaction history. Coinbase confirmed that the violation hit approximately 1% of its user transaction months.
Among those affected was the capitalist of Risk Roelof Botha, managing partner of Sequoia Capital. There are no indications that his funds were accessed, and Botha declined to comment.
According to the reports, the Coinbase Security Director, Philip Martin, said that the customer service agents hired in the center of the controversy were based in India and had fired after the violation.
The exchange has also said that it plans to pay between $ 180 million and $ 400 million in remediation and reimbursement to affected users.
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