Cryptocurrency exchange FTX will reimburse US$6 million lost by users in a phishing attack over the weekend, according to a Monday Twitter thread from the exchange’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
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Fast facts
- The phishing scam involved the crypto trading platform 3Commas, which allows users to build automated trading bots on other interlinked exchanges like FTX.
- According to Bankman-Fried, the scammers used a common phishing technique, making a fake copy of the 3Commas website, intercepting the victim’s login details, then performing trades on the victim’s real accounts, stealing millions of dollars in the process.
- “We’ve mostly stamped out sites that try to phish users by masquerading as FTX,” said the crypto billionaire on Twitter. “But we can’t fix fake sites impersonating other services … including 3Commas.”
- However, Bankman-Fried, a self–described effective altruist, said: “In this particular case, we will compensate the affected users.” On-chain data suggests that around US$6 million was stolen in the weekend scams.
- “This is a one-time thing and we will not do this going forward,” stressed Bankman-Fried. “Right now each company has to separately deal with phishing and it sucks.”
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