The victim lost more than $24 million worth of stETH and rETH in the attack.
Fraudsters don’t often succeed in swindling cryptocurrency whales with substantial market-influencing holdings. Nevertheless, in an unfortunate twist of events, a crypto investor recently incurred multimillion-dollar losses in the latest phishing scam.
The theft is now regarded as one of the most significant crypto phishing attacks in recent history.
According to on-chain data, a prominent crypto whale with the address “0x13e382” suffered a significant loss of $24.23 million in liquid-staked Ethereum on September 6. This loss included 4,851 rETH worth around $8.58 million and 9,579 stETH valued at $15.63 million, all of which fell into the hands of phishing scammers.
After further investigation, the Web3 security firm Scam Sniffer disclosed that the whale unintentionally granted token approval to the fraudsters by authorizing “increaseAllowance” transactions.
The pilfered funds were initially deposited into two addresses, specifically “0x693b72” and “0x4c10a4.” However, the scammers have since transferred a portion of these assets to the Fixed Float exchange, while the rest now resides in three separate addresses.
One of the wallets tied to this fraudulent activity, specifically “0x4c10a4,” is linked to multiple crypto phishing websites.
The victim reportedly has extensive on-chain experience and serves as a significant liquidity provider. They offer WBTC/USDT liquidity exceeding $1.6 million on Uniswap V3 and have been engaged with various protocols, including Aave, 1inch, Curve, OMG, EOS, and more.
The identity remains undisclosed, but the earliest recorded transaction linked to this address dates back to June 2017, originating from Bitfinex.
The development comes amidst rising crypto phishing scams swirling by countless verified paid bots utilizing X (formerly Twitter), especially after the rollout of the new Twitter Blue subscription last November.
Last month, prominent on-chain sleuth ZackXBT also pointed out the alarming growth of phishing scam spam from fake verified organizations on the social media platform.