Amidst a series of assaults scammers imitating Coinbase abscond with 17M from a user

In the past week, several users of Coinbase, a popular cryptocurrency platform, have fallen victim to scammers impersonating the company. One unfortunate individual claims to have lost $1.7 million in the scam. Tegan Kline, co-founder of Edge & Node, shared the story of a close friend who had their self-custody wallet drained of funds after being tricked by a scammer. The scammer called the victim, pretending to be from Coinbase’s security team, and sent an email that appeared to be from Coinbase, providing a false sense of legitimacy. The scammer then convinced the victim that their wallet was experiencing issues and directed them to a website to enter their seed phrase to stop the transactions. Although the victim knew it was risky, they entered a portion of their seed phrase, which allowed the scammer to drain $1.7 million from their wallet. Alex Miller, CEO of Hiro Systems, also shared his experience of being contacted by a scammer pretending to be from Coinbase. Miller suspects that his information may have been leaked in 2022 from CoinTracker’s email service provider database. He advises others to cycle their API keys if they have been using CoinTracker. Another Coinbase user, TraderPaul04, encountered a similar scam attempt when a fake Coinbase representative called claiming there was a login attempt on their account. The scammer tried to convince TraderPaul04 to click on a fake password reset link to steal their account password. However, TraderPaul04 was skeptical and insisted on contacting Coinbase customer service directly, causing the scammer to hang up. Another user, beanx, reported a similar scam call where the fake Coinbase representative claimed there was an unauthorized login attempt on their account. It is important to note that these incidents are not unique to Coinbase, as scammers often target cryptocurrency users through phishing and seed phrase compromise attacks. In the first half of 2024, approximately $1.19 billion was lost to crypto security incidents, with over $900 million stolen through phishing and seed phrase compromise attacks.