Elderly Bitcoin Holder Falls Victim to $330 Million Social Engineering Scam

ZachXBT, an on-chain investigator, revealed the identity of a victim involved in a massive Bitcoin theft in the United States.

On-chain investigator, ZachXBT has revealed the identity of a victim who had a massive Bitcoin stash stolen, totalling 3,520 BTC (about $330 million).

The stolen coins were transferred out of the victim's wallet and into a different address.

This elderly individual is the victim of a large-scale crypto scam that is currently being investigated by the on-chain investigator.

The theft appears to be linked to social engineering, a type of crypto scam that includes deceptive practices like emails or phone calls to obtain personal and confidential information from the target.

The victim's Bitcoin was moved from a wallet that was holding a considerable amount of cryptocurrency.

It seems that the attackers went after this individual specifically and the individual isn't aware of the sophisticated methods that were used.

However, ZachXBT expressed concern about how the attackers were able to access the victim's private information, given the advanced nature of the scam.

Social Engineering Theft Details

Social engineering scams are another form of danger in the cryptocurrency space as people make victims grant the scammers direct access to their digital wallets.

This might be the case with this elderly victim, which includes schemes that may involve email fraud to phone scams.

This type of scam targets the victims and takes advantage of their familiarity with the technology making it quite difficult to spot them until when they are already operating.

On-chain investigator, ZachXTB also pointed out that the attackers transferred the funds in a suspicious manner and immediately moved them.

They traded the Bitcoins on over six platforms before exchanging them for Monero, a privacy coin that makes it difficult to trace transactions. These series of moves were suspicious more especially because it came close on the heel of a sharp increase in the price of XMR.

The investigation into the theft is ongoing, and ZachXBT has been closely monitoring the situation. He pointed out that the BTC involved in the theft had originated from sources that were "interesting," raising questions about the initial acquisition of the funds. The laundering and conversion of the funds to XMR point to an effort to conceal the origin of the stolen cryptocurrency.

Despite the increase in phishing attacks in the crypto space, the volume of this theft puts it among the largest in the last few months. The loss includes one of the biggest single losses in the history of Bitcoin thefts, both in terms of quantity and monetary value.

This theft occurs against the background of growing concerns about the safety of digital assets and the prevalence of such frauds in the crypto space. This year alone, the losses to this industry have reached to millions of dollars despite US Secret Service, with Canadian authorities, disrupting over $4.3M Ethereum phishing scam. Meanwhile, Immunefi, a platform specializing in web3 bug bounties and security services, claims that thieves have stolen over $92m worth of crypto this month alone.