My trustwallet of $211,000 has been stolen, any help or advice is appreciated

[matrixconnor]

That doesn’t make me stupid because I got my account drained. I didn’t click on any airdrop scams or links. My computer was hacked and I never download any exe files or anything. I literally just use it for crypto, I connect to a VPS and that’s it. Somehow my computer was hacked and my secret keys were stolen

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[Outhue]

At first, I didn't trust you because this is coming from a fresh account but reading even further got me, I nearly asked for you to provide that police report, but now it's not needed.

I am sorry for your losses, this amount is way too big to be stored on a software wallet, these types of crypto wallets are meant to function online, they will always be online, and thats the danger there.

If you can have up to $2000 in BTC or other digital assets then you can afford a hardware wallet, your ETH could be saved today if you choose a $200 Trezor hardware wallet, I started to get worried once I lost all my BTC on a software wallet in 2023 and I purchased a hardware wallet.

I can't sleep at night keeping 200k worth of asset on the Trust wallet, I hope you get help and your fund gets recovered, but take this as a lesson, do not ever let such happen again.

[Hispo]

Man, $211,000 on Trust Wallet? On a mobile app/browser extension? Not even an $80 hardware wallet?

Best of luck.

I would take that a step further and advise everyone  to stay away from Ethereum altogether, where 90% or more of all crypto hacks have always occurred.

I get the criticism towards Ethereum, but of course the huge majority of hacks would be on Ethereum — because all the apps are on Ethereum/L2s. Ethereum's competitors outside of Solana have little to no on-chain activity.

Right. That was the first thing with came to mind when I read the amount of
cryptocurrency this unfortunate person had in their mobile wallet. I don't want to be rough or hurt OP feelings... But not buying a 200$ advanced hardware wallet to safeguard almost a quarter of a million of dollars sounds like insanity to me.
There are even people within the Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency community in general which do not even have 2000$ and yet they choose to store whatever they have into a hardware wallet (which does not even need to be a premium model).

There is no much I can say beyond what others have. For that amount of money it would be worth it to hire a professional whose job is to track criminals like this one, in exchange of your stolen money. Though, the free recovery cases I have seen are from people who went all their way until the end and with their own available resources to hunt down those scammers.

[matrixconnor]

I’m planning on buying a ledger wallet. I just ordered the Nano S

Yah it’s pretty devastating, never been such a traumatic situation. Feel like people would probably commit suicide after something like this. I’m just super depressed because that was like years of hard work, 12 hour days to save up and just like that some piece of **** just wipes me out. Nobody deserves this, now I got to rebuild. I hope I can find some altcoins to get in at an early marketcap to recover from this. Its pretty depressing

[matrixconnor]

Man, $211,000 on Trust Wallet? On a mobile app/browser extension? Not even an $80 hardware wallet?

Best of luck.

I would take that a step further and advise everyone  to stay away from Ethereum altogether, where 90% or more of all crypto hacks have always occurred.

I get the criticism towards Ethereum, but of course the huge majority of hacks would be on Ethereum — because all the apps are on Ethereum/L2s. Ethereum's competitors outside of Solana have little to no on-chain activity.

Right. That was the first thing with came to mind when I read the amount of
cryptocurrency this unfortunate person had in their mobile wallet. I don't want to be rough or hurt OP feelings... But not buying a 200$ advanced hardware wallet to safeguard almost a quarter of a million of dollars sounds like insanity to me.
There are even people within the Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency community in general which do not even have 2000$ and yet they choose to store whatever they have into a hardware wallet (which does not even need to be a premium model).

There is no much I can say beyond what others have. For that amount of money it would be worth it to hire a professional whose job is to track criminals like this one, in exchange of your stolen money. Though, the free recovery cases I have seen are from people who went all their way until the end and with their own available resources to hunt down those scammers.

I invested already about $1500 with a Private Investigator online to track my funds but unfortunately it seems like I’m at a dead end with the destination address going to an anonymous exchange at eXch.cx

Does anybody have the contact or ZachXBT or someone who’s proficient enough to trace these criminals with success. I tried contacting ZachXBT on Twitter but I don’t think he responds to individuals. If any of you know of a good resource that I can hire or speak to please let me know, one that’s legitimate as I’ve been hearing there’s a lot of scam services that don’t really recover

[Amphenomenon]

It might not be your fault, since Trust Wallet can be easily hacked but it is seems like you know the right ways of saving your funds but I don't know why still stick with Trust Wallet but hope you are going for a more better wallet or at least a good hardware wallet like Trezor.

Hope your Mom gets better soon, the is your strength, I see you already did made a post in their ANN thread base on MusaMohamed which will get to their notice faster

I guess I'll need to move my bitcoin again, didn't know that Trust Wallet is that easy to bypass that they can just easily take away the funds in someone's wallet that easy? Kind of ironic that, you name your product as Trust Wallet but then you as a hodler can't trust to put your funds in there, I guess the plan to move it all to a safer Electrum wallet is going to be a priority to me now, prevention is better than cure.

OH but you been on this forum since 2016 and you still store all/some of your Bitcoin on Trust Wallet, truly this is surprising and I would love to know how you even cope during mempool congestion because Trust Wallet has many limited features aside from it low security and charging exceeding fee. In case you are still using it for altcoins, I will advise you move to MetaMask or any other open source good altcoins wallet

[Reatim]

Sorry to hear this. I will not be too optimistic about reaching out to or being noticed by eXch themselves but I do hope you get your funds back one way or another.

If you are 100% sure that it was not your doing how your wallet got hacked, then I am afraid that the wallet itself might be the problem. It might have a very weak security mechanism which is probably how those scammers got to your wallet. I suggest you change into a different wallet and perhaps research about other possible and much safer ways to store your crypto.

[AVE5]

We are all sorry to lose so many dollars or money that you have saved throughout your life. But you may have acted like a fool to keep your entire life's worth of money in a trust wallet. Instead of a trust wallet, you could keep your dollars in a hardware wallet that you have full control over. Moreover, Trust Wallet is very safe. You may have failed to properly store or secure your wallet seed phrases, causing them to be stolen or hacked by someone else, resulting in the scammer gaining access to your account or wallet. If a person does not share his trust wallet seed phrase with anyone, then a fraudster cannot easily gain access to that wallet.

I don't know if the scammers will give you back the amount of dollars you lost. Finally, best wishes for your mother, may she get well soon.

I feel so much for the Op over his lost of long holding assets. We either learn in the hard ways or the soft ways but in a time like this please let's be psychological enough to understand that words of courage can serve as a healing to the wounded and the weaks.
Let's just say the Op had not been careful enough to keep his Privacies such as the seed phrase as mentioned on a secret note which could have lead to someone gaining access to his Wallet assets.

Sometimes it might not be one of the populous criteria which we feels could be the only alternative that someone can Invade into your private wallets such as keep exposed to your seed phrases, ris could also be able to happen when you share the same internet provisions with others such as hotspot or even WiFi. I may not have the technical knowledge of how it's possibly done but I've come across a friend who told me in years past that he can have access to my device as long as I'm sharing the same hotspot of internet provider with him and then he said he knows a lot about technically getting access into others privacies but that's not his problem because he has got no business to invading others.
This can also be possible to happen on the other side of carelessness of entrusting your phone to someone trusted to you without your wallets being encrypted.

Conciousness is the most tool to maintain your privacies and keep your secrets secrecy .

[Cricktor]

Is there a hard wallet that connects to an iPhone or are most of them thru androids. Also which hard wallet would you say is pretty user-friendly?

I would only handle a crypto wallet with at most some pocket money on a mobile phone. Why? Because a mobile phone is easy to loose and is a target for theft. Mobile phone users in a lot of cases do all sorts of internet and games shit on their mobile phone, the cheaper the apps, the better. And what do you think are free apps paid with? Your usage data or ads! Seriously, not the best environment for privacy and safety. But, you do yours.

Hypothetically speaking, if let’s say your computer is compromised or has a Trojan in it and if you connect your hard-wallet is it still pretty safe?

Normally there's no protocol or software in the hardware wallet's firmware that would allow the extraction of your wallet's main secrets, the seed and your private keys (actually Ledger Nano firmware has software for key extraction in it and Ledger Nano firmware is closed-source, so you don't know what else shit is in there; you seem to favour the closed-source obscurity camp). Ledger crap? In my humble opinion a poor choice. Anyway, I'm not here to judge...

I’m assuming with a hard wallet, your keys are on the device so if you happen to misplace that wallet your funds are also gone? You can not use your keys to open it in another hardware wallet?

Try to gather some knowledge how so-called BIP39 HD wallets work (basically every hardware wallet is internally a HD wallet). They are based on a random secret of mostly 128 or 256bit length from which by a cryptographically safe procedure all private keys are derived by a deterministic recipe. All you need to recover your wallet are the usually 12 (128bit secret) or 24 (256bit secret) mnemonic recovery words. Those recovery words you have to keep offline and secret and redundantly stored safely.

I don't care about ETH but a good place to learn about HD wallets is e.g. https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/hd-wallets/.

You could setup one particular HD wallet in multiple different hardware wallets and they would all produce the same private keys. That's the beauty of HD wallets.

It’s pretty brutal that I can’t recover funds, so you’re saying all these huge hacks where people steal 60 million worth of bitcoin from larger exchanges. Everybody just gets away with the money? The feds or government agencies can’t catch them, because if they transfer it to an exchange like eXch, it’s game over then? That’s just crazy considering how much money we’re talking about in some of these hacks

Some thieves make mistakes and get caught. E.g. the hacker and his wife who robbed Bitfinex years ago got caught. But depending on how much has been stolen, a lot of thieves get away with it.

Your loss was likely avoidable (I'm not entirely sure as you refused to answer some of my questions I asked earlier). I don't know who determined facts when you say, your computer was hacked. Is that only belief or do you have real evidence? There are many different cases documented in this forum how users screwed up with wallet security. No-one said safe self-custody is easy!

Maybe a bit over-the-top, but if you want to learn about good self-custody, have a read of the PDF at https://www.smartcustody.com/.

[SamReomo]

I'm very sorry for your loss OP but I don't think that you'll be able to get your funds back. It's really not worth it to keep $211k on Trust wallet which's basically a closed-source wallet and can have vulnerably that many hackers and find and compromise the wallets of the users remotely with remote code executions.

It's not a small amount and to be honest you have lost the funds due to your own unawareness. If you had taken proper steps for storing of your funds then you would not lose your crypto-funds. Now, you won't be able to do anything and I suggest you to be careful in future, and learn about personal wallets and device safely first before holding such huge amounts.

[albon]

I assume scammer has withdrawn your money. It's very different from a centralized exchange site when it pushes its users to register and comply with the regulations like doin KYC verification. Im sorry for your loss but the chance for you to recover your funds is so damn small.

You're absolutely right. If the scammer sends the stolen money to the CEX platforms, he will definitely fall into the trap. By contacting the support of one of these centralized exchanges and providing the required information and documents and the police report, they will freeze the stolen funds and then begin the necessary investigations to return them to the victim; unlike eXch, their policies and services are different they don't follow and track customers and operate outside the oversight and pressures of AML and KYC, so they may not be able to freeze transactions.

Perhaps reaching out to reputable investigators like @ZachXBT could help unless the scammer has actually benefited from these funds and succeeded in covering up the tracks of his thefts.

It's sad that the OP lost this huge amount of his life savings. Indeed, negligence in securing his assets and wallet was the biggest factor in his loss, so we cannot blame TrustWallet or any other wallets for this.

[Rabbitqt]

That really sucks, OP, and I feel for you. However, you should have done more research. A quick Google search shows how unsafe Trust Wallet is, especially if this was your life savings.

[Argoo]

I have repeatedly heard that scammers often hack the emeil password, and through it they view backup data and all saved passwords on the device. Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to check whether emeil has been hacked in order to understand how scammers were able to penetrate Trustwallet data. The entrance to this wallet is also protected by a six-digit code. I think that we should not immediately blame the poor security of the Trustwallet wallet. We cannot store in the memory of the device on which we work the passwords and private keys of our cryptocurrency that are significant to us.

[OrangeII]

I am truly sorry about the loss you have experienced. The only party that can help you at this time is eXch to freeze these assets. However, as mentioned by several people above, there is a small possibility that the exchange will freeze these assets.
However, there are many things that can cause you to lose these assets, and it could happen because of the Trust wallet that you have. Try to remember where you connected the wallet, or the link in the email, or whatever. Maybe the hacker needs some data regarding the wallet you have to be able to access the wallet you have.
Apart from that, try storing large amounts of assets like that in a hard wallet. It may be safer than storing assets in a soft wallet such as a trust wallet or others.

[electronicash]

not very sure iff you will just be wasting money to pay tracking those guys but i hope he can track them and make them give the ETH back to you.

could this be a warning to Trust wallet users or is it because OP connected his wallet to an app?  its such a very low-security wallet if its just someone hacks it but i know for sure that if Trust Wallet users are careful in connecting the wallet, they may be able to prevent this from happening.

[jrrsparkles]

Sorry to hear this. I will not be too optimistic about reaching out to or being noticed by eXch themselves but I do hope you get your funds back one way or another.

If you are 100% sure that it was not your doing how your wallet got hacked, then I am afraid that the wallet itself might be the problem. It might have a very weak security mechanism which is probably how those scammers got to your wallet. I suggest you change into a different wallet and perhaps research about other possible and much safer ways to store your crypto.

The number of ways to compromise a device's security is not limited so finding how I got scammed itself a long process and we can't blame the wallet as well cause we are the one decided to use it.

No device is safe when it's connected to internet that's why hardware wallet is mandatory for someone who wants to store more than few thousand dollars in their address.

[Silberman]

The number of ways to compromise a device's security is not limited so finding how I got scammed itself a long process and we can't blame the wallet as well cause we are the one decided to use it.

No device is safe when it's connected to internet that's why hardware wallet is mandatory for someone who wants to store more than few thousand dollars in their address.

This is unfortunately the dark side of this market, I mean the technology is incredible, the community is great, but there is a small part of it that really gives it a bad reputation, as losing so much money and yet have no way to get it back is something that will scare anyone, and what is even worse is that this could happen to anyone, and suddenly the money that it took you so long to save can disappear in seconds, ruining the image you may have had about this market forever.

[peter0425]

Not a lot of words to offer but apologies that you had to experience such a tragic loss.

There are way too many methods for your wallet to be drained. It might be infiltrated through your device. Either it by some phishing link or whatnot. We cannot be sure how a malware might have gotten into our system because we use the internet so much and open different kinds of websites and applications.

It might also be infiltrated physically. If there was anyone that had known where you device is and how to access it then that might be a possibility as well.

Blaming yourself would just be futile at this point so I just hope that you do get the justice that you deserve, op.

[jrrsparkles]

The number of ways to compromise a device's security is not limited so finding how I got scammed itself a long process and we can't blame the wallet as well cause we are the one decided to use it.

No device is safe when it's connected to internet that's why hardware wallet is mandatory for someone who wants to store more than few thousand dollars in their address.

This is unfortunately the dark side of this market, I mean the technology is incredible, the community is great, but there is a small part of it that really gives it a bad reputation, as losing so much money and yet have no way to get it back is something that will scare anyone, and what is even worse is that this could happen to anyone, and suddenly the money that it took you so long to save can disappear in seconds, ruining the image you may have had about this market forever.

With power there always comes with great responsibility, crypto is basically decentralized money which means we are our own bank and if that's the case then we have to make sure everything for the security of our funds and this is not a negative side but most of us realize only after learning things in the hard ways.

[Sophokles]

The number of ways to compromise a device's security is not limited so finding how I got scammed itself a long process and we can't blame the wallet as well cause we are the one decided to use it.

No device is safe when it's connected to internet that's why hardware wallet is mandatory for someone who wants to store more than few thousand dollars in their address.

This is unfortunately the dark side of this market, I mean the technology is incredible, the community is great, but there is a small part of it that really gives it a bad reputation, as losing so much money and yet have no way to get it back is something that will scare anyone, and what is even worse is that this could happen to anyone, and suddenly the money that it took you so long to save can disappear in seconds, ruining the image you may have had about this market forever.

With power there always comes with great responsibility, crypto is basically decentralized money which means we are our own bank and if that's the case then we have to make sure everything for the security of our funds and this is not a negative side but most of us realize only after learning things in the hard ways.

Security has been an issue in crypto for years, and yet the industry hasn't found a better way to protest user funds. The same thing happens again and again due to a lack of awareness. I think all the exchanges and dex should implement a compulsory fundamental educational walkthrough for every individual who is going to use their service for the first time. Most of the time, newcomers become the victims of such an incident. Some of the new ZK solutions look really promising and can mitigate this kind of risk.