Bitcoin Forum

Forgive me but my Bitcoin was stolen from the Atomic wallet on the 3rd of June as part of a massive draining of funds globally from that wallet. I just wondered if there was any way to recover or block the address of the hacker ?  I can actually see where the stolen Bitcoin sits but cant get authorities or anyone of note to help me with it.
Atomic wallet appears to be actively wanting the hack to disappear and blocking victims from various social media platforms where it is, at the moment the only recourse is a legal one but that will take a long time.
I write this as a hope there might be an answer , this destroyed me and I dont know where else to turn.
Anyway thankyou
Sorry if this is wasting your time.

So sad you getting this experience right now but btw you should be able to trace the transaction using the text in your wallet since you still have access to the wallet,  but unless if you want to tell us that you no longer have access to the wallet and of so be if then what will be left of you is to provide all necessary evidence the Atomic wallet really aided an internal hack on user is a wallet.


More also the fact that the who sega is going in such a way that many of those who want to make use of such wallet will be warned beforehand and this is very necessary at some point,  but for now you are the only one raising the accusation against them.

Unlike the bank and some altcoins that can instantly freeze the account of a scammer when noticed, bitcoin is not centralized meaning there is no central body controlling it and because of that you can’t block the address of the hacker all you can do right now is to pray that the hacker makes any stupid move that will lead to him doxing himself and I doubt anything like will ever happen.


Yo might be right because when the hack happened I remember going through a Reddit post about investigating the invent but as the moment I’m making the post that thread has been removed by the moderator of Atomic Wallet subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/atomicwallet/comments/13z9wdw/we_are_investigating/


Sorry for your loss but like I said, there’s no way to block the account of the hacker if it was possible Atomic Wallet would have done that by now except they were directly involved in it.


I don’t this so, there were two warning threads about a breach on the Atomic Wallet system I’m not sure how it happened but users were advised to sweep their coins into a more secure open-sourced non-custodial wallet.
 A Non-Custodial wallet, Atomic Wallet, being compromised (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5454994.msg62349200#msg62349200)
Atomic Wallet hacked! Get your funds out now!
 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5455045.0)

You can not freeze bitcoin in any Bitcoin address (in a self custodial wallet) but if it is altcoin, altcoin developers can use their smart contract to freeze it. If hackers send your bitcoin to exchanges and you know what are the exchanges, you can open a support ticket with proofs to ask them freeze those coins for you.

It is hard as you must have evidence and I think the hacked amount should be big to be noticed by customer support staffs. Exchanges can do it with any user account on their exchanges but they need reasons to do it.

---

Two months are very long time, you are too late.

Thankyou for the replies.
Ive been taking many of those avenues and will continue to do so.
Hopefully technology will catch up with the hackers someday.

Atomic wallet actions since the hack has led to anger and suspicion as they have not updated victims, deleted old tweets, blocked victims and continue to leave their exploited software up for users to download and use. Its a warning as you have pointed out, dont trust Hot wallets, hardware wallets are the best places to store your Bitcoin and crypto.
Anyway thankyou for your replies and thoughts.

Atomic Wallet owners aren't poor. I've read the hackers stole $35M but they're rich enough to cover losses. If they pay it'll be expected they'll pay after every hack. They can't stop ppl writing about the hack but they'll ban users from talking about it on their social media.

Users life savings were stolen so they should've supported them. Did they discover how their wallets were hacked?

It is impossible for you to get back your bitcoin if it was transfered to a noncustodial wallet, it means that your bitcoin is gone. If it was transfer to an exchange then you need to go and meet the police and explain to them with your evidence,they can contact the exchange and ask them to block the account where your bitcoin is. This can be done if your country legalized cryptocurrency,and you need to act fast but from your explanation,I guess it might be too late because the hacker might transfer the coins to another wallet by selling it,if he used an exchange to keep the coins. The possibility of your having back your coins is very slim and might not happen

It seems to be unclear, but in the thread on the subject they say this:


The point is to avoid closed source wallets like the plague.


Yes, but while you're at it, you'd better choose an open source one.

This atomic wallet hack happened a while ago and the dev team has been horrible the way they are communicating. No idea why some people got their accounts drained while others didn’t.

You said it was on June 3rd it was drained, did you do any updates to the software right before it got drained? Trying to figure out how they got so many people to lose their crypto. Unfortunately i don’t think there is much you can do. They can’t reverse the transaction. And the dev teams won’t be covering the losses.

First of all, you're not wasting our time. We are here in Bitcointalk to help each other. Anyone can tell their concerns here for free no matter how much is your concern, our fellow members here are always willing to assist or fix a problem at their best. However, just like what other said, there's no way to retrieve Bitcoin once it was transferred to a non-custodial wallet because only the
hacker are in control with it. For better security in the future, you should always keep your Bitcoin in a trusted wallet where you own the private key.

I do not want to sound unsympathetic, but we have always said... " Not your keys, not your coins "

DO NOT trust third parties with your Private keys, because they are juicy targets for hackers or insiders inside the company use their position to assist the hackers to steal the coins.

I hope they get it sorted for you.... and that you will get some money back in the future...  :P

Well, not your keys, not your crypto - I thought atomic wallet was and is a non-custodial wallet?, I've never used it , so i might be mistaken, ive always believed atomic wallet was a non-custodial wallet , and some user on this forum even usually recommended it to some other users before the hack happened.

If the above be true, then you don't really need to blame the users whos funds were drained, because it could have been any other non-custodial wallet, even a hardware wallet as well, ive heard instances where people complain about their funds disappearing from their ledger hardware wallet, dont know if its true, but if you check reddit, such complains are scatters everywhere, and assuming those complains are true, can we still tell them "not your keys, not your crypto"?

Atomic wallet is still non-custodial wallet but the fact is they turned to be closed source so without access to the source code, users cannot independently audit the software to ensure its security and reliability. Which weans we have to rely completely on the wallet provider's regarding security as well as privacy of our wallet.

If someone is looking for an alternative to Atomic wallet then their better choice will be Unstoppable Wallet (https://www.unstoppable.money/), which is open source, multi crypto wallet and available in both Playstore and IOS.

URL: https://unstoppable.money/
Github: https://github.com/horizontalsystems
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/horizontal_systems/unstoppable-wallet-ios
APP store: https://apps.apple.com/app/bank-bitcoin-wallet/id1447619907?ls=1
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.horizontalsystems.bankwallet

Why did so many ppl trust Atomic Wallet when it's closed source? Atomic wallet's noncustodial decentralised so users are responsible for their cryptocurrencies. 1% users were hacked so they're paying the price for trust. Blockchain tracker ZachXBT (https://twitter.com/zachxbt) said the largest one-person loss was $7.95 million the five biggest individual losses accounted for $17 million (https://uk.pcmag.com/security/147202/over-35-million-in-crypto-reportedly-lost-after-atomic-wallet-hack). Full hack stolen was $35M from 1% Atomic Wallet users.

Atomic wallet aren't updating their blog (https://atomicwallet.io/blog/june-3rd-event-statement). If it's an inside job they'll leave clues if they're professional hackers it won't be easy finding the criminals until they move funds between addresses.

Don't apologize about asking this since you are not wasting people's time, bitcointalk is created for any topic that any member asked so feel free to post here.

But in your case I case there's nothing you can do with those stolen bitcoin as there are no people have power aside from those criminals to return your balance so the only thing you can do is accept that its gone forever and start to move on. Next time be careful to deal with your balances and always remember what other people says that not your keys not your coins this is important reminder to anyone.

Thanks bringing this to my notice because I was also looking for a wallet to use. But before you used that Atomic Wallet, you would have asked question and people would have told you to use a reliable wallet instead of using your choice of wallet and now you lost all the funds. I am really sorry for that.
And I don't think anyone can help here to recover the funds unless another hacker/authority ICT which you will spend another money to do that because cryptocurrency decentralized so once coins are moved to another wallets, it is gone unless the person send it back again. Third party can't do anything.

It's a very sad experience. Unfortunately, when Bitcoin is hacked, no one can freeze it as it has no authority. It's on a decentralized blockchain, and only those who own the key can access the coins. If it's not your fault, then it's better to avoid using this kind of wallet as it might already be compromised. It's still better to spread your Bitcoin across different wallets to minimize the risk since there is no online wallet that is hack-proof.

Very sad to hear about your loses. And as everyone said you can't recover it because of its decentralization nature. But it's really a matter of worry that non custodial Wallets are even being hacked or compromised. So where we are safe with our funds?.

Obviously I will suggest to use only Hardware wallets. But is it possible that everyone will have a hardware wallet ? If they have small assets or want to reduce expenses then obviously use an online wallet. So what wallets should we choose? The answer is Open source non custodial Wallets which are Electrum, Blue, Mycelium wallet. They are the safest from every online wallets. Even you should hold your assets in some individual wallets so that if hacking happens it will not affect to your whole assets.

I don't think so. Even It's normally impossible to catch up a transection because Bitcoin is decentralized and anonymous. At that time hackers are much intelligent than a common user so they will mix their coin or something else. You should know that in 12 years technology still not able to catch up hackers. So it's a barrier and also a properties of Bitcoin. That's why safety is first while adopting Bitcoin.

Investigators say 1% wallets were hacked. Atomic Wallet says 0.1% wallets were hacked. Atomic wallet shouldn't be trusted. They aren't updating users about the hack. If they're deleting tweets there's a plan to remove it from their past. Their blog protects them from responsibility by saying However, anyone who has access to a user's seed phrase may import it to any other similar wallet app and get access to funds (https://atomicwallet.io/blog/june-3rd-event-statement).

It doesn't make reason. How's it possible $35M was stolen on one day?

Sorry for the lost of your Bitcoin. Sadly, there's nothing you can do about it, the hacker is just waiting for the right moment to start moving the funds gradually to a Bitcoin mixer and no one would ever be able to trace the coin. Never use a close source wallet like atomic wallet in storing your funds. Get a hardware wallet like Trezor, Passport, Coldcard etc. but if you can't afford it you can settle for an open source wallet like electrum wallet, sparrow wallet, unstoppable wallet or blue wallet. And only download from the official website.

Bitcoin was not hacked but bad Bitcoin exchanges, wallet softwares were hacked.

You lose your bitcoins to hackers and when they move stolen bitcoins to new wallets with private keys they own, you and nobody can freeze those bitcoins. Nobody has private keys that only own by hackers if they only store it in non custodial wallets.

Opportunities only come if hackers move their bitcoins to centralized exchanges where they have to KYC to use accounts and don't own private keys. It is good chance for you but you will need to request support to seize hackers' coin.

That's right, it's better to hear people's opinions several times on the use of wallets than to understand and learn from your mistakes and your own experience once.
OP, my condolences to you. Losing is always very difficult, no matter how many Bitcoins you had in your wallet. We often regret our self-confidence and maybe our ignorance of complete and correct information. But in this age of the Internet, every situation must be approached very carefully. You are interested in finding a hacker, but what prevented you from coming to the forum earlier?

It wouldn't be bad if you posted the address where the BTC that was stolen from you is located, because someone might be able to connect that address to some centralized exchange, which would give you the possibility to block those funds. In addition, if you don't want to give up on trying to do something, first write a letter in which you will describe what happened to you and send it to all centralized exchanges with all the relevant information.

The chances are of course minimal, but considering the stolen amount, it is always possible that the hackers will be found one day.

Block the address of the hacker? None.
Recover your money from hacking? For a long time, I don't know if there is/are any hacker that will return all of the money that they hacked into a particular exchange or whatever it is.

Authorities? What will they do? They can't track it unless the address has been posted online by somebody that already shared his/her real information online, or been used in some various transactions, but aside from that, they can't do anything to it. This is one cons of decentralization. Unless you know the owner of the address personally, you don't have any power to recover the money that you lost.

I don't know the feeling of getting hacked because I didn't experienced losing money yet because the exchange got hacked etc.
Nevertheless, losing money to a hacker really hurts, but the only thing that you can do is to just learn, move forward, and move on. Just let the "Authorities" do their job (if they can trace it). No need to apologize as well. The developers of Atomic Wallet must be the one who apologizes to you, and to all users of it.

Sorry for your loss. I also hope that you will get the needed help you need. Don't be too hard on yourself to avoid developing health issues. It is painful to lose your fund after you have chosen a wallet that is generally seen as a decentralized one. You are not to blame for the loss because you didn't put your fund in a centralized wallet.

Atomic Wallet is supposed to give victims the needed support and feedback regarding the recovery process. But their actions might raise the suspicion that this hack was done by insiders. In choosing wallets, the best option now is decentralized and open-sourced wallets.

I'm conversant with this case, thank God I don't have money there, that's why we should be more informed that we should not only deal with the self-custody wallets but also the wallets with open source so that anything shady could be tracked by the experts in the field.

I'm afraid, your money is gone and gone for good, atomic wallet itself is complacent in this fraud according to the documentary I watched, they can't be trusted. The hackers even used one of the mixers we campaign for here to mix the coins, so it's gone my friend, sorry.

Well, if the official case could be filed, maybe an investigation could be concluded. But this is not a former arrangement, so it lacks legal backing.

I am sorry for your loss but there's no way to recover it but the only way that you can do is to wipe any potential wallet that you have and send it to another one.

And if you're planning to go report it to the authorities, they might not even do something about it but just like record and have it blotter and nothing will change.

Remember on what software you downloaded and maybe the culprit has gained access to any of those and that means your computer ain't free from it until now.

I'm sorry about this but there is no way to recover those lost bitcoins.  My advice is not to rely on applications found on the appstore but to download only open source code guaranteed by the community such as electrum or even green from Blockstream can be fine.  I know these people deserve so badly but we think we often make ourselves wrong when there are important things to decide on.

I thought nothing was done about the hack from the team side? How did you get this information? Can you drop a link because I know a guy who lost assets to the hack using Atomic wallet and there is nothing done yet, maybe they are paying those affected on time phrase?

This is not a problem from users but from the developers, I think we need to be careful with the crypto wallet we plan to use, it's why I use wallets from bigger players in the crypto space, if a hack happens from their side they will be responsible for it and pay those affected back, but not the same with new crypto wallet companies.

The Atomic wallet indeed owes you its customer an apology and a promise to recover the funds for you since it can still be tracked by you.
I also wonder if it was only your wallet that was hacked OP and if a press statement was released to the public via news/notification channels about the hack?

I also pray you learn the right lessons from this experience and if possibly recover your funds.

We've got to download from official sites other else we're risking losing all cryptocurrency savings. Atomic wallet scammers aren't going to spend in a rush they'll mix the stolen funds slow. If they leave clues they'll be caught but it won't bring the OP's funds.

It's on Atomic Wallet's (https://atomicwallet.io/blog/articles/june-3rd-event-statement) official site.

Well, an apology won't give the people their money back.
The only thing they care about are refunds and I wonder if this will ever happen.

I am also a frequent atomic user and got lucky nothing was stolen.
But, I have to admit, at the time of the hack I didn't real hold a lot of funds, haha. Lucky for me.
Though there have been times that this wallet contained a good amount of $ of several currencies. If the timing would have been worse i could have lost a lot as well and that's a scary thought for me.

That's why I stopped using it until they implement some better security.

There is no technology or no way that will help us freeze, stop, revert the bitcoin transaction.  That’s how it works in bitcoin algorithm. The irreversible transaction is one of the prime gene of the Bitcoin make up. If we change that then it will be useless and it will make the entire bitcoin working obsolete.

I’m sure there are many cases happening like this everyday. Some could be mistakes of users, some are hacks, some could be wallet errors too. I think we should use more conventional way of storing our bitcoin like paper wallet, hardware wallet with full ownership with private keys.

The hackers will tumble funds to anonymise bitcoin they've stolen. It's minimal chances but if he accepts your advice it's going to help if they leave clues behind. He should post the address.

If you're still reading this, try to see if you can deduct your scam loss to your tax as it's possible in some countries, see: https://koinly.io/guides/

Tracking coins can be difficult especially if perps know how to obfuscate their tracks. Even if the coins landed in an exchange account which is actively being used, you still have to hope the exchange and authorities will cooperate with you so yeahh chances aren't that good. I'm not discouraging you btw, just laying it all out there.

PS: please ignore the newbie claiming to be a hacker that can help you as it's merely a scam attempt. I've reported the post but I'll leave this here as a just-in-case.

Most of my funds are in my open source wallet, I just had about $10 TRX in my atomic wallet, after the hack I went to check and it was sitting right there. Lucky me, I had to quickly transfer it out of the wallet. Maybe they hacker was targeting wallets with bigger funds. For those who lost their assets, I can only hope they learn from their mistakes and never to store their funds in a closed source wallet like atomic wallet.

Please forget about atomic wallet, whether the team improves security or not, it's a closed source and it could be hacked again.

Sorry for the loss, atomic wallet should find ways to recover the funds and resolve the issue. If not, it needs to provide funds from its reserve fund. Atomic wallet is blocking the claims through social media and partner firms have gone for the lawsuit against atomic wallet as they hadn't provided with any clear information regarding the hack and hadn't reached the police for support.

More investigation firms have jumped into the case and trying to figure out the team involved. However everything is on some assumption and no solid proof have been found against any of the hacker team. Nothing can be done than just waiting for the good news.

Sorry mate,  I can only imagine how this feels, imagine saved so much up in your wallet then all of a sudden something happens to coins. Well I have heard of so many people complaining similar cases and that was why I almost went crazy when I saw that my electrum wallet I was using had some complications with the amount I was having in there but on knowing to mw it was because I have not updated the app yet but after the update everything was normal.

The OP was last active on the day (s)he wrote the initial post. While it's possible that the user follows the topic without being logged in, it's unlikely to be that way as you'd want to answer if there's something to answer for.

Just recently user DaveF posted the current "update" of Atomic Wallet on the theft. It's not worth it to repeat what Atomic Wallet calls an "update". They basically insult their customers by blaming anyone but Atomic Wallet and still "looking into it". Almost four months passed and still basically nothing from Atomic Wallet about this incident. That's lame, to put it in very kind words.

Didn't they have something in place already to recompense the affected wallets?

If I'm not mistaken Atomic Wallet has done something on their end, either an investigation or a full recompense of the lost assets cause by the way, this is a mistake on their end that the customers shouldn't suffer in the first place.

Edit: okay so they apparently have not done anything but reassure the public that they are not a weak wallet. This lead them to face a lawsuit worth 100 m which we hope goes  towards those that are affected cause damn, I don't see anyway you guys are getting something out of this anymore. 3 Months in and they haven't even given anything of substance or value to the ones affected.

Last time I saw some citation of Atomic Wallet's terms of service there was a statement that losses caused by faults of Atomic Wallet shall be compensated at max of 50$ per user. Well, Atomic Wallet reiterates their mantra, it's not their fault. So from their standpoint there's no obligation to compensate anyone who was robbed their coins. I'm sure that somewhere in some wall of text you acknowledge their ToS by using the wallet.

Clearly, I'm not defending Atomic Wallet at all, on the contrary.

I don't know why I always have the feeling that most of these hacks are done by the developers of these wallets. I can be wrong but I think there is always an insider in all these as it is easier for the developers to find any loopholes than an outsider.  

If you love your funds, I will advise you stay away from that wallet because this is a very bad signal. One of the ways to avoid regrets is in this digital space is to be sensitive to red flags such as we have seen in atomic wallet.

It's important to realise the danger of insiders carrying out hacks. If they've found vulnerabilities they don't have to If it's open source you're giving yourself the best chance to keep cryptocurrencies safe.

If a wallet's been flagged it shouldn't be used it's common sense. If you didn't know it's compromised it isn't your fault. Don't have regrets download wallets from official sites.

This is horrible news. I read the breach affected at least 5,500 crypto accounts on their platform and over $35 million in crypto stolen.

Thinking of it like a back job from the developers themselves, right? That gut feel could be right but it will remain as a gut feel as we can't prove that.

There have been bad news about that wallet and that's why it's best to avoid it while you can. There are people that are hard hearded that despite knowing the news about them, they don't bother and just continued using it.