The cryptocurrency community is sending donations to popular podcast host Eric Savics after he announced his entire bitcoin savings had been stolen in a phishing scam. Several red flags have since started showing up, including his profile being set to private.
According to a report by IBTimes, cryptocurrency-based Protocol Podcast host Eric Savics published a tweet on June 12 claiming his entire savings of 12 BTC had been stolen in a hardware phishing scam. He later confirmed the scam involved a fake Google Chrome extension which asked for the seed phrase of his hardware wallet.
Savics, who operates a now-private Twitter account, said,
All my savings are gone. I have zero Bitcoin.
In an attached video, Savics explained he was nearing his goal of purchasing an apartment with the BTC he had been saving since 2013. He reached out to the crypto community, asking for help in potentially tracking down the stolen funds.
The community rallied in response, sending Savics leads on crypto forensics teams that could assist in locating the BTC. Members also began sending the podcaster donations, with the wallet accumulating more than 0.77 BTC at the time of writing.
Since then, Savics' Twitter account was set to private, and blockchain sleuths identified the 12 BTC transaction moving the funds off of his address. Some pointed out that hackers would likely set a high transaction fee to move the funds quickly, but the transaction only had a 3 satoshi/byte fee - a rather low one that could see the transaction takes hours to confirm.
— dark pill (@DanDarkPill) June 15, 2020
The low transaction fee means that before the transaction was confirmed it was possible to send the BTC to another address with a higher fee, saving the funds.
Nevertheless, Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance, also gave his support and said his company would blacklist the receiving address for the stolen funds.
Sorry to hear about your loss. Will ask the team to put that receiving address in the blacklist.
If you can provide details on how the phishing worked, it will help others too.
— CZ BINANCE ?????? (@cz_binance) June 13, 2020
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
