A hacker stole $1.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from him using a technique as old as the world

“Today is a bad day”. It would be hard to blame SOL Big Brain, an NFT collector who tweeted this phrase (whose name turned out to be particularly ironic) on Friday, August 25. Indeed, the investor fell victim to a scam that drained a large chunk of his crypto wallet. The damage is huge: around $1.5 million, or €1.38 million in stablecoins, ether and GEAR tokens.

Scams abound in the cryptocurrency world, but some are still more complex than others. As surprising as it may seem, the person who dumped SOL Big Brain’s accounts is not actually one of them. Therefore, the hacker had to hack the Telegram account of the boss of a wallet management company in order to confiscate his victim’s assets.

A simple crypto scam cost its victim $1.5 million

“I received a message from a portfolio management company asking me to claim my tokens on Telegram”says SOL Big Brain, accidentally admits that he is ” lazy ” And “distracted”. It was probably this laziness that cost him dearly. Although he claimed to have verified the identity of the sender of the message, which is also available in other group chats, he was unaware that the message had been hacked by a malicious person.

The investor realized his mistake after his tokens were transferred. “The company did not state that its founder was hacked. The scammer used my real name, ETH address and copied the real entitlement site. So everything was planned.”she complains. The main idea of ​​the story: It is very important to check that you are sending your money to the right place, especially if the money is over one million euros.