Bitcoin Forum

An Electrum wallet user claims to have lost a fortune in bitcoin after installing an older version of the software from a malicious source.

https://www.coindesk.com/loses-16m-bitcoin-crypto-install-malicious-electrum-wallet?__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true

The entire media is trying to blame Electrum for it at-least this is the way they are creating the news. Instead of blaming Electrum then can publish an awareness news about how to safely handle bitcoin. We would not see this kind of sad stories.

I am sorry for the user who lost the 1400 BTC but it's him to be blamed here.

Just because of this I post here now time to check these things and have safety first formula as never go with unsecured links or sites because scammers and cheaters ready to steal your funds.

As someone who has that kind of amount and doesn’t know how to be safe with it says a lot. I don’t understand why he would install it without verifying the source of the installer. Instructions on How to verify is very straightforward. It's probably not going to get taken back, for sure.

At least in the article it shows that Binance is blacklisting any bitcoins that come from that exchange.

It has always been advised to verify the downloaded file before installing. Electrum never does auto update too. It notifies you and you will need to re-download the latest file and verify it before updating the old version.

It's very easy but unfortunately most of the people over complicate it.

His story surprised me a lot. Did not update since 2017 and probably doesn't read our board otherwise he would be aware of that trick with Electrum outdated version. He communicated this but  many cases remain undeclared, fraudsters' business is  flourishing as I can see.

Why is it always that people who have lot of Bitcoins don't know how to keep them safe and for us who do know how to keep them safe have not enough to worry about keeping them safe? Why couldn't they keep all these coins distributed in multi cold storage wallets? If you have that many coins, money I would think was not a problem. They could have purchased many hardware wallets and/or keep them on different offline computers.

Many people dont have the habit of updating software after a new version is released nor do any checks on the changelogs as to what improvements have been done in the update. For them it is "just another update" and "waste of more data from their internet plan". I know this sounds strange but even for software that mediate in storing valuable assets are handled like this by them.

At least one needs to be careful about crypto and its related software, keep them updated, keep their own knowledge full-proof but this rarely happens.

I have already posted my comment on this topic here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5272416.msg55100001#msg55100001), but the answer to your question is pretty simple. People who have a lot of money are not necessarily intelligent, because some money is just an inheritance, or it is the result of some risky investment that has brought big profits.

Investing in Bitcoin is much more than buying gold, silver, stocks or real estate - and it's certainly more technically demanding than anything I've mentioned. I have always been of the opinion that the developers of Electrum also bear part of not financial, but moral responsibility for the failure that occurs at the end of 2018 and which actually has no expiration date.

But the responsibility is also on each user individually, because if you want to be your own bank then you need to know how to run a bank - after all we cannot compare a desktop crypto wallet with a traditional bank where our funds are insured up to a certain amount. Just as we can say that curiosity is what often kills a cat, we can say that ignorance is the reason why people lose their BTC in rather strange ways.

Is Binance's CEO fudding on Electrum for some reason? :P

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1300060478656274433

Is he aware that he's the one running a custodian service?

Also, like I said in the other post, there is no apparently proof that this guy ever got scammed. He just posted "I got scammed, here is the address". And that was enough for Binance to black list the address?

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1300061833299070976

i'm very skeptical about this story because i have a very hard time believing someone who had $16 million worth of bitcoin wasn't using hardware wallets, didn't take care of basic security steps such as verifying the signature of the wallet he downloaded and was using an online PC to store his fortune!
just about everything is wrong with the story and it would have only made sense if he had a bitcoin or two not 1400!

he just found yet another hot topic and is trying to get his name (and his centralized exchange) heard and gather twitter followers.

I followed the story on Twitter and it had a lot of discussions, but it should be noted that using Electrum doesnot mean is safe if you know how to don’t know how to secure your account, and it is a mistake to invest in something that you do not know anything about.

Even Buy a hardware wallet will be useless if you don’t know how to secure them.

No one know real data about Binance, no headquarters or many things that can be used to trust them.
If he compared it to electrum, then at least everyone knows all the parts of the code.

I feel sad for the person, It must have been his investment but the poor knowledge in safe keeping his asset made him loss it all. People should be knowledgeable in safe keeping their keys, this might be cause from the malicious site.

That's pretty rich coming from Binance... who lost 7000 Bitcoin last year when they got hacked... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-08/crypto-exchange-giant-binance-reports-a-hack-of-7-000-bitcoin ::) ::) ::)

Yes. Very well said. I completely agree. Investing in Bitcoin is not as same as investing in other stuff. You need to make yourself aware about the technicalities of it. And make sure that you know what you're doing. Same thing happens when people lose money in Ponzi schemes and/or bad alt-coins and they blame the Crypto for it. When in-fact they're responsible for not doing the necessary research before investing in a project. And it is also true what you said. It is usually money that is easily acquired that you become careless about spending and as well as safe-keeping.

There's a possibility 
As far as I know there is a one trust wallet that was acquired by binance. So yeah, he could be fudding but not in a direct way because he knows that if he does it directly. He would face a lot of backlash  :D

I mean why else would be so concerned about the 1400 BTC. It's not like it's the highest amount that has ever been lost to hackers.

That  phenomenon  of recklessness is spreading  like pandemic. Another guy claimed  (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/5072#issuecomment-683666105)the loss on the same reason.He traced the part of the stolen Bitcoin which landed on Binance  but exchange did nothing to block them

It all checks out.

There was a matching transaction confirmed shortly before his GitHub post: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transaction/ef600c380a239d9b929c6c964deaf7060e309750950a516cee65576232b0c53c

The address his coins were sent to - bc1qcygs9dl4pqw6atc4yqudrzd76p3r9cp6xp2kny - is known to belong to the Electrum scammer, and can be found in dozens of reports from other victims on this forum, Reddit, and Twitter.

In addition, the address which was stolen from, plus lots of other addresses which feed in to it show frequent address reuse, including using the same address as both an input and as change in a single transaction, suggesting the user in question was not very technical or knowledgeable about bitcoin.

I lost $40,000 in this Electrum hack through a quick lapse in concentration - I'd eaten a bit too much and wasn't thinking straight / feeling lazy. That's all it takes folks!

I'm circling back around on this - is there somewhere I can at least register the loss? I'dve thought there is some value in a company monitoring stolen coins or something?

I don't think there any company that does the job of monitoring stolen coin because despite the transactions in bitcoin blockchain being viewable by anyone. It's also a little easy to create new addresses and also mix stolen bitcoins through bitcoin mixers making it hard for someone who's trying to trace the stolen coins.

Where are you located. Every country has a cyber cell, google their contact info for your country and register the complaint. Not saying that they'd find anything but you never know. Many of the offenses go unreported because the victims think nothing will happen but you have nothing to lose. Just register a complaint, provide all the info and then forget about it.

That's a huge loss but installing wallet from a malicious source (and we should always assume that any source but the official website is malicious) is just asking for trouble.

I remember reading about this. Apparently, Binance had step in to prevent the funds from being sold on its exchanges or blacklisting the address. But unfortunately, with a few mixers it's very easy to launder the money. Hopefully the guy's a whale and has $16 mil more hanging around somewhere.

there are a lot of these "companies" that claim to be doing that, they are called "blockchain analyzers", there are at least a couple of dozens of them around with new ones being created regularly!
to this day i have never seen any of them play a major role in catching any of the hackers. they either go uncaught or the law enforcement catches them when they do things such as using the same coins to send to their verified coinbase account or something like that.

yes this is what i was wondering about, just making sure i round it off by doing all i can - filing my name somewhere with the lost amount/address etc so at least if something happens somewhere someone knows what to do. they take 10-20% cut or whatever etc.