Cryptocurrency Recovery Efforts

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT announced that he assisted in recovering approximately $275,000 in cryptocurrencies for a Coinbase customer victimized by a social engineering scheme. During his investigation, he discovered evidence linking an additional $5 million in stolen bitcoin and ether tokens to the same scam.

In April 2024, an elderly U.S. victim was targeted by Indian scammers posing as Coinbase support, leading to the theft of a significant portion of their life savings. According to ZachXBT, the victim had reportedly been misled into transferring their funds from a Ledger hardware device after the scammers claimed their account was compromised.

At least two reporters from The Block received similar scam calls, where falsely claiming that their Coinbase accounts were hacked. However, it was found that Coinbase had not issued any genuine security alerts.

ZachXBT expressed sympathy for the elderly victims, noting the difficulty in blaming them for falling prey to such scams.

His investigation revealed that on August 10, approximately 15 BTC were sent to a nameless centralized exchange and subsequently moved to the Tron blockchain. Additionally, nearly $200,000 in USDT was transferred to another OTC desk.

Analytics firm Chainalysis reported a decline in illicit on-chain activity in the first half of 2024 compared to the previous year, although stolen funds and ransomware incidents were rising. Specifically, the inflow of stolen funds almost doubled from $857 million to $1.58 billion, while ransomware inflows saw a modest increase.

Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued warnings regarding the rise in crypto fraud, particularly relating to “pig butchering” schemes. Recently, ZachXBT revealed his involvement with law enforcement in investigating a hacking group responsible for stealing $243 million from an unnamed individual.