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Billionaire technology investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lost nearly $900,000 worth of cryptocurrency over the weekend after downloading and interacting with an apparent fake wallet.
Independent blockchain sleuth Wazz spotted the hack on Sept. 15, saying they observed suspicious behavior with one of Cuban’s wallets after months of inactivity.
The “Shark’s” wallet was drained of US dollar-pegged stablecoins, staked ETH (stETH), SuperRare (RARE) tokens, and some Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains, transaction history from Etherscan shows.
Wazz later suspected that Cuban may have been just moving assets around after some $2 million worth of USDC was withdrawn and sent to a different wallet.
Cuban, who onlookers suggested was likely alerted of the transactions, then managed to save over $2.5 million worth of Polygon (MATIC) after transferring them to a Coinbase exchange address.
The attack seemingly stemmed from a fake Metamask wallet that Cuban downloaded. In a statement to DL News, Cuban confirmed he had lost $870,000 after he had gone on MetaMask “for the first time in months.” He suggested that the application he used may have had malicious intent. He said he had searched for Circle on Google and not MetaMask.
Fake MetaMask extensions or applications are not unheard of. Over the years, fraudsters have used these fake platforms to trick users into providing their private keys or seed phrases to gain access and drain users’ cryptocurrency wallets.
This was not the first time the billionaire had losses in crypto. In 2021, Cuban, an active investor in decentralized finance (DeFi), lost an unspecified amount of capital on what he called a “rug pull” after the algorithmic stablecoin project Iron Finance collapsed amid a supposed bank run.
This month has been marked by several high-profile crypto scams and hacks, including the $41 million drained from online crypto casino Stake.com on Sept. 4. Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx then fell victim to a hack involving more than $50 million worth of assets a week later.
Meanwhile, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X account was compromised in a phishing attack on Sept. 10. The perpetrators used Buterin’s reach to lure unwitting users through a post that contained a phishing link, running off with around $700,000.