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After losing her crypto to hackers three times, a Queensland woman is determined to keep investing in digital coins.
Shirley*, in her 50s from Far North Queensland, is a full-time caregiver for an adult child with a disability.
“I was putting in a little bit of money every week,” she told news.com.au.
But she had three bad luck experiences.
The mother made her first investment through New Zealand-based exchange Cryptopia in 2017. Unfortunately, Cryptopia suffered one of New Zealand’s biggest thefts two years after hackers stole about $24 million of his $250 million worth of cryptocurrency on exchanges. rice field.
Earlier this year, the company went into liquidation and creditors like Shirley are expected not to recover a cent.
Hurt by this experience, the mother decided to use a “cold” wallet. This is a secure offline method that is not connected to any online network and cannot be hacked.
Yet, in the last few months, both of her accounts have been compromised in various ways.
My faith has been shattered, she said, but I still believe in Ripple.
She believes Ripple XRP will explode in price like Bitcoin and will continue to invest.
Shirley first invested in Bitcoin, but then switched to Ripple XRP because she lost everything.
She estimates her loss from the Cryptopia collapse to be between $30,000 and $50,000, depending on the price of Bitcoin under consideration at the time of the January 2019 hack.
“I was strategic about where I wanted to invest,” she said. Investing in Bitcoin was attractive.
“It was going really well then.”
Shirley’s nightmare deepened when she purchased two hard wallets called secure hardware wallets for crypto assets called Nano S and Nano X from French company Ledger.
Setup requires a 24-word passphrase and comes with a physical USB-like contraption. She has created two accounts of hers and keeps the device in her wallet. I have never had my device stolen or my wallet forgotten unless I opened an account.
Nonetheless, the mother was disturbed to learn in June that she had lost access to one of her accounts. Her device was asking for her one passphrase for her account, but she had her own passphrase not working.
“I tried to make a deposit one day as usual, but it didn’t work. And they told me my recovery phrase was incorrect,” she explained.
The worried mother contacted Ledger’s support team, but no immediate help was forthcoming.
“I was back and forth and no support helped,” she said.
So she shared her situation on Twitter and tagged the Ledger support desk, hoping they would fix the issue.
Soon, Ledger’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) tagged her in a tweet to offer support and provide a link to update the Ledger app. The account had her 5000 followers and was tagged with Ledger’s official Twitter handle as well. Ledger’s Twitter handle did not respond.
After clicking the link, I went to the Ledger website and entered my password.
However, devastated, she soon learned that the account was impersonating the real Ledger CISO. Anything that was in her remaining ledger account was immediately transferred.
The entire Ledger wallet is worth $14,000, which is a lot for me. I cant believe I am in this situation, she said.
Her money was transferred to a cryptocurrency exchange called KuCoin. She flagged a deal with them and has since been frozen.
She filed a police report and Queensland Police contacted the exchange on her behalf, but the money remains frozen.
News.com.au reached out to Ledger and KuCoin for comment, but missed the deadline.
of Previous conversation with news.com.auMatt Johnson, a real-life CISO, explained how the first hack may have happened.
“The 24 words derive a combination that provides your private key. We store the key in a very secure way and isolate it from the internet,” he said.
“Those 24 words are the keys to the kingdom. If someone else can understand those 24 words, you don’t need a pin.
You want to keep those 24 words safe.
In the past, Johnson said customers lost all their money after they wrote down their passphrases in draft emails or later put them in the cloud where they were hacked.
Some cybercriminals quickly realize the importance of finding 24-word strings in someone’s private files.
Johnson recommends storing 24 words in a bank safe or safety deposit box, and we’ve heard of people storing the Ledger Nano S keys in non-burning, flame-retardant material.
*We will withhold your name for privacy protection.
alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au
