Victim Of $40K Metamask Account Hack Speculates Massive Ring, Realises “It’s just a dude”

PATNA (CoinChapter.com) — A Metamask user suffered for not using a hardware wallet, as malicious elements hacked his account and stole nearly $40,000 in DAI.

Reddit user ‘Daroons‘ shared a post explaining his plight. The victim stated that about a week ago, roughly $40,000 in DAI stablecoins, along with some FTM tokens, was transferred to another wallet.

Once the hacker transferred the tokens to a new wallet, they converted the DAI tokens into FTM and forwarded them to another wallet. Afterward, the wallet forwarded the FTM in six batches to a third wallet address. Finally, all the tokens ended up in a large wallet with a lot of activity.

Daroons noted that the final destination of the stolen funds was a wallet with a lot of activity. The large number of transactions made it difficult for the hacking victim to trace his tokens. Moreover, the final wallet has nearly $20.6 million in FTM tokens.

The size of the wallet led Daroons to speculate that the hacker might be part of a “massive scam ring” or a money laundering service. The Reddit user also tried to use Bitquery to track the transaction, but the resulting graph was more complicated than he could handle.

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In an update to the original post, Daroons stated that he had tracked down some transactions from the intermediary wallets used in the hack to an OKX hot wallet. The discovery led to another one, that the hack was not the result of a group of criminal masterminds. Instead, Daroons realized that

This is no big operation. It’s just some dude.

As a result, Daroons remained hopeful of recovering his funds if the exchanges involved coordinated with him.

What To Do When When Your Wallet Is Hacked

Daroons accepted that he was careless with the funds, stating that he was “an idiot for not using a hardware wallet for such a large amount.“

Crypto traders and investors fall victim to a hack often due to carelessness. Users sometimes share wallet information with scammers promising massive returns, or share/store their wallet’s login information in a place accessible to a malicious third party.

Other times, users mistakenly download a hacked version of the wallet software, for example, Metamask, which compromises the security of their funds.

Recently, on Jan 28, malicious elements took control of the Azuki Twitter page and siphoned off over $750,000 worth of USDC, 11 NFTs, and over 3.9 ETH in under 30 mins. The hackers shared infected links that promised a ‘land mint‘ for the Azuki NFT project.

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While it is almost impossible to safeguard from Azuki-like attacks, crypto traders can take certain measures to strengthen the security of their wallets, like not sharing keys, using hardware wallets for large funds, using a secure connection, etc.

However, once users suspect that hackers have compromised their wallets, they should immediately work to safeguard the remaining funds. The victims can contact customer support of the wallet involved, before moving the remaining crypto tokens to a separate wallet or a hardware wallet.

But, it is important that the new software wallet is on a separate device since a hack likely resulted from the original system getting compromised by malware. Finally, users must use powerful antimalware software to scan their devices, or purge the operating system and install a fresh copy.

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