Phishing Scams Continue to Take Place With Electrum Wallet Users

• One of the victims claimed that 1400 BTC worth $14595000 was stolen while the second victim reported a loss of 36.5 BTC worth $380512
• he specific ID that led to the address revealed that it was involved with more than 75 different wallet addresses
• Some analysts said that Electrum wallets aren’t as secure as hardware wallets

Recently, two more cases of the Electrum Bitcoin wallet scams have been reported. One of the victims claimed that 1400 BTC worth $14595000 was stolen while the second victim reported a loss of 36.5 BTC worth $380512. This isn’t the first time that Electrum wallet scams have surfaced. The Electrum phishing scams have prevailed for over two years now. The user claimed that his crypto was stolen after he installed an older version of the software. 

Users are Advised to be Careful With Private Keys 

Electrum as we know is one of the most popular BTC wallet services that is based on the client-server protocol. Jason Lou, the chief operating officer of the OkCoin exchange told CoinTelegraph that users should be careful with their private keys especially when they are holding a relatively high amount of cryptocurrency which tends to lure hackers. Lou further stated that this appears to be a phishing scam where the user was forced to install an update which consequently gave the hacker access to his keys and funds. 

The User was Prompted to a Update Which Gave the Hacker Access to the Keys

Phishing scams continue to grow in numbers and through the time they have evolved in their sophistication says Lou. One of the victims claimed that 1400 BTC worth $14595000 was stolen while the second victim reported a loss of 36.5 BTC worth $380512. It was reported that the hackers had set up a handful of malicious servers to get access to the accounts. However in the most recent case, the victim had posted in GitHub that he had not accessed his wallet containing $14000 BTC since 2017. On downloading the malicious old version of the software he attempted to transfer 1 BTC. He was then prompted for updating the security information which triggered an update and finally led to the scam. 

Connection of the Hacker With a Binance Account

The recent investigation conducted by the CoinTelegraph team found that there happens to be a connection between the hacker and a specific account in the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. The specific ID that led to the address revealed that it was involved with more than 75 different wallet addresses. Electrum in a tweet said that Binance is the upstream of scammers and the user has just become another victim. 

Some analysts said that Electrum wallets aren’t as secure as hardware wallets but they are easy to use because of which users generally prefer. However they are not perfect for holding large sums of crypto for a long time.

Ritika Sharma

With a background in journalism, Ritika Sharma has worked with many reputed media firms focusing on general news such as politics and crime. She joined The Coin Republic as a reporter for crypto, and found a great passion for cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs and other digital assets. She spends a lot of time researching and delving deeper into these concepts around the clock, and is a strong advocate for women in STEM.