Mark Cuban narrowly avoids $2.5M loss in $900K crypto hack

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—by Protos Staff
Even seasoned billionaires find crypto markets tough, particularly Mark Cuban who has a history of getting wrecked with dubious altcoins. 

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban fell victim to a phishing attack on Saturday after reportedly downloading a fake MetaMask application that caused him to lose almost $900,000 in crypto assets. 

Cuban was unaware of the hack until DLNews approached him. He told the outlet, “I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some sh*t in it.”

“MetaMask crashed a couple times. I just stopped,” Cuban explained. “Then you [DL News] emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account.” 

His wallet was previously inactive for five months. He reportedly saved himself $2.5 million worth of Polygon tokens when he moved them to a Coinbase address. 

“I went on MetaMask for the first time in months,” Cuban said. “They must have been watching.”

Crypto sleuth WazzCrypto was the first on X (formally Twitter) to first notice that $870,000 of staked ETH (stETH), Tether USD (USDT), Matic tokens (MATIC), Rarible (RARI), USD Coin (USDC), and various Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains had all been transferred from Cuban’s wallet. 

Read more: How billionaire Mark Cuban got revenge on DeFi with KlimaDAO

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin saw his X account hacked this month, resulting in a series of phishing links being shared under his name. Victims of the scam lost around $691,000 worth of crypto assets, mainly consisting of NFTs.

Another phishing attack involving Retool and Fortress Trust occurred just last week. The hacker tricked a Retool employee into clicking a malicious link and giving up their multi-factor authentication codes through the use of a deepfake voice and information on his place of work to mimic his employees. $15 million in crypto was lost. 

Update September 18, 16:54 UTC: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin lost $691,000 worth of crypto assets as part of a phishing attack.

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