Mark Cuban, billionaire businessman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, lost approximately $870,000 to a crypto fraud late on Friday as he confirmed to DL News.
The sudden movements in a wallet marked on blockchain explorer EtherScan as “Mark Cuban 2″ were first spotted by pseudonymous on-chain sleuth WazzCrypto.
Unaware of the wallet movements when approached by DL News Cuban later said, “Someone got me for 5 eth.”
“I went on MetaMask for the first time in months. They must have been watching,” he told DL News.
Cuban was set back by around $870,000 across 10 cryptocurrencies, as his losses extended beyond 5 Ether, worth about $9,000 at current prices. Notable assets lost in the hack included a range of stablecoins and various tokens like Lido-staked Ether, SuperRare, and Ethereum Name Service.
MetaMask scam?
“I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some shit in it,” Cuban told DL News. He said he had searched for Circle on Google, not MetaMask.
He mentioned that the incident happened when he went to his account to clear it up on his phone.
“MetaMask crashed a couple of times. I just stopped. Then you emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account,” He mentioned.
Users are being tricked into providing their private keys or seed phrases by many online fraudsters who create fake MetaMask extensions or applications. Once these scammers gain access, they can easily drain users’ cryptocurrency wallets.
“Since I was only working with the account that got hacked, none of my others gave up anything,” he said.
Cuban said he managed to transfer the remaining assets to Coinbase with “the dongle that Coinbase uses for authentication.”
Cuban the DeFi investor
Cuban’s involvement in DeFi has garnered attention, but it hasn’t been free from challenges.
During the 2021 bull market, Cuban served as a liquidity provider for Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin. Unfortunately, he experienced significant losses when TITAN’s price plummeted to zero due to a sudden “bank run.” Reflecting on the incident, Cuban admitted, “I got hit like everyone else.”
Furthermore, amid the current bear market, there has been a surge in high-profile crypto scams and hacks. Just this month, CoinEx reportedly suffered a hack resulting in over $50 million in losses, while Stake.com, one of the largest online casinos in the crypto space, encountered a drain of $41 million from its platform just last week.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X account was compromised last Saturday. Buterin’s hacker made away with around $700,000 from unwitting users by sharing a post that contained a phishing link.
Once a transaction is confirmed and added to the blockchain ledger, it becomes an immutable record that remains unchangeable. The intentional design of blockchain ensures that transfers are irrevocable by nature.
Discussion about this post