Crypto.com now says someone tried to drain $34m from hundreds of accounts
Crypto.com on Thursday said in a roundabout way that an unidentified person stole or attempted to steal as much as $34m in cryptocurrency from customer accounts.
In an update on the cyberattack reported earlier this week, the Singapore-based firm said it “learned that a small number of users had unauthorized crypto withdrawals on their accounts.”
Normally, such actions are attributed to some entity – an attacker, a threat actor, thief, malicious insider, hackers, miscreants, or such – even if that term is only a placeholder for the responsible party because attribution isn’t certain. Crypto.com however made no mention of any person or persons known, suspected, or presumed to be behind the attack described in its incident report, as if the funds absconded on their own.
The code for $FJB allows the currency’s operators to manually lock an owner’s token balance, an unusual practice in a space that aims to avoid centralized authority. This would prevent an owner from selling coins, according to Simon de la Rouviere, who reviewed the code for Mother Jones . De la Rouviere is a digital artist and co-author of ERC-20, a coding standard used to program contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, which supports Ether, a cryptocurrency second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization.
De la Rouviere points out that this restriction doesn’t apply to the operators of $FJB. “They can transfer as much as they want, whenever,” he says. De la Rouviere outlines a possible scenario: If $FJB’s price started to drop, the coin’s operators could freeze some token holders from selling to prevent a further spiral, while the operators remain free to sell off their own coins. By the time locked investors regained access, their tokens could be worth much less.
Let’s see if I can translate what this means: This is a pyramid scam which forces you to type “This is a pyramid scam” into a text window to pass a screen which says “This is a pyramid scam” in big red flashing letters while playing an mp3 of a chorus chanting “This is a pyramid scam” in a monotonous, ominous bass chant continuo with two sopranos and an alto singing “Pyramid scam, pyramid scam” over the top in a three voice fugue, and the contract includes a clause that you have to get “I invested my life savings in a bitcoin pyramid scam” tattooed on your forehead.
