According to blockchain investigator ZachxBT, Bitconner lost $91 million in one transaction to a social engineering attack on Tuesday, and was then sent to a privacy-focused Bitcoin wallet.
The victim was fooled by a scammer who pretended to support crypto exchanges and hardware wallets, losing 783 Bitcoin (BTC) in one transaction, Zachxbt said in an X post on Thursday.
Blockchain data shows theft occurred at 11:06am on Tuesday, with exploits beginning to wash stolen funds through Wasabi wallets, focusing on Bitcoin privacy, hiding traces of stolen funds.
Social engineering attacks allow attackers to trick people into revealing sensitive information such as private keys and passwords, and attackers can steal funds. These exploits are ramped with crypto, targeting everyone from sophisticated crypto investors to seniors.
When asked how they could avoid being socially designed, ZachxBT said they assumed that every phone or email they received was “scam by default.”
Zachxbt rule out North Korean hackers
Zachxbt did not name the suspect, but he excluded the infamous North Korean state-supported Lazaro group as a potential perpetrator.
The attackers received the funds under the clean Bitcoin wallet address “BC1Qyxyk” before attempting to hide them using the Wasabi Wallet privacy features.
Zachxbt added that by coincidence, the attack occurred exactly a year after the theft of the $243 million Genesis creditor.
Scammers pretending to be hardware crypto wallet providers
Scammers frequently use sophisticated methods to impersonate Crypto hardware wallet providers such as ledgers and Trezor.
In late April, a scammer impersonating a ledger sent a letter posing for the company and asked the crypto wallet for a secret recovery phrase to control the device.
They argued that “critical security updates” should be performed on devices, and that if they fail to comply, they would “restrict access to wallets and funds.”
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In the same month, elderly US citizens lost over $330 million in Bitcoin to social engineering attacks, sending shockwaves into the industry.
Crypto theft is still a multi-billion dollar industry
More than $2.1 billion has been stolen from crypto-related attacks in the first five months of 2025, according to blockchain security firm Certik.
The biggest incident was a $1.4 billion exploitation of Crypto Exchange Bybit in February, highlighting the risks of even large, widely audited crypto platforms.
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