Crypto.com freezes all withdrawals citing ‘suspicious activity’

Crypto dot com announced that it has paused all withdrawals following “a small number of users reporting suspicious activity on their accounts” then they reassured that all funds on the platform were safe.
One of the people who reported the problem was Billy Markus, who is the founder of Dogecoin. Marcus noticed a suspicious transaction pattern on the ETH network. Following the reports, the platform immediately ceased all withdrawals to conduct a security check.
A crypto investor named Ben Baller reported that he had lost some 4,28 Ethereum currently worth about 15,000 USD because of an unauthorized transaction from his account.
Even more alarming is the detail that Baller used two-factor authentication, which means that the hackers had breached the platform’s cyber security protocol.
It looks like they stopped the hack on time in this case, thankfully.

My wife and I both use the crypto.com MCO card (top up) for most of our daily transactions. She wanted to top it up yesterday, and found she needed to set up 2FA. I was sure we had set this up beforehand, but went through the motions anyway. Later the same day I wanted to transfer some ETH to my metamask wallet, and went through the same rigmarole as my wife had just been through to top up her MCO card.

I assumed it was Crypto.com just rolling out yet more software with no customer communications. Seems par for the course these days with the brave new blockchain world.

But I should say, in general, I like the way Crypto.com is going and if their coin gets any cheaper, I’ll be buying again.

Oh wow. You’re right. I just tried logging into the app and it was different from normal.

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I must admit that I rarely log onto my (dedicated) email that I use for banking and crypto (as opposed to my normal email) so I miss a lot of the announcements from the Crypto.com exchange. My fault for not keeping up. I just looked back at my first CRO purchase last year. Aaaarrrrgggggghhhhhhh - I should have known what I know now. Silly me.

Looks like it’s closer to $15m. Maybe it was hack, maybe it wasn’t. Crypto.com isn’t being absolutely clear about what happened.

Just came across this. Looks like the “stolen” funds are being laundered… so definitely sounds like a hack.

This is one of the areas I may wish to specialize in once I have completed my basic blockchain education. Like all emerging systems in the past, there are unintended consequences to freedoms, and they are normally associated with responsibilities. These two extracts from the linked docs are encouraging. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Singapore regulatory authorities. They hold the standards to which the rest of the world would be well advised to aspire to.

** * In a previous statement to CoinDesk, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said that mixers like Tornado Cash may fall under the definition of a money transmitter, and therefore have “obligations” set by the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).

  • Law enforcement has previously shut down other mixers such as Bestmixer, which was raided by European Union authorities in 2019, and Helix, which was shut down by the FBI in 2021 for laundering Darknet funds.**
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The hack is now up to $34m. And more concerning, the issue maybe have been an exploit in their 2FA code base. Crypto.com hasn’t said so specifically, just that it’s 2FA has been improved. But that sounds like an admission to me.

They added that the that all 483 affected accounts are already fully reimbursed. So that’s good, at least. I guess. But it bothers me that it took them this long to admit it. Did they think it wouldn’t come out?

Didn’t they say no customer funds accessed, right when it all started? I guess if you pay back the funds, that’s true. But the hack still happened!

Close to a 50% right now! ha

?? I bought at $0.075. That’s not a 50%, we sold out 80% of CRO holding in November at about $0.85 - to buy ONE tokens for DeFiKingdoms. LOL.

Sorry I meant to say 50% off, but I don’t know what I was looking at. I thought price was $0.039. It’s actually $0.39. So you got in a ridiculous price! Great timing! 10X!

Hi,
I have just re-read my response to your post. I do not use this example to show off, and that is how I read it back. For sure, there were other accumulations in 2021 that lost us money too. But this did change my mind in a very fundamental way - and that was in my attitude towards trading cryptos on a larger scale than intended earlier in the year. CRO was just the extreme example. I also sold out in December 2020 from BTT, HOT, Siacon and TRON in favour of BTC. I was not disappointed, but then I saw some of these I sold do a 10X and 15X within the next 3 months, so felt “hard done by”. With CRO, I think it is a good long term hold. My wife and I both make use of their MCO top up cards which return 2% of all purchases in CRO tokens. When we had sold most of our CRO at around $0.85 I realized that our “cashback” had been more like 7.5%, not 2%. I’m not sure that can be repeated, but it is a pleasent and unexpected outcome. :heart_eyes:

Oh wow. I’ve only heard about TRON. I don’t think that one was doing all that well.

I had not heard about the other ones either. What did happen with TRON?

TRON (TRX) is # 24 in size of market CAP.

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