Award-winning and Popular Sleuth ZachXBT revealed Coinbase users lost over $65 million to fraudulent schemes in the last 2 months.
The crypto sleuth who played a key role in recovering several funds shared his latest insights on the largest crypto exchange in the United States.
ZachXBT, in a thread on X, shared key details from his research on Coinbase, revealing figures lost to scams and fraudulent techniques employed by bad actors.
The Sleut revealed that his research on coinbase stems from data obtained from coinbase users who sent direct messages to him on X.
This means that the figure he is postulating could be a lot lower than the actual amount lost.
Coinbase is the most popular exchange in the United States driving crypto adoption in one of the biggest markets for crypto in the world
Social Engineering Scams
ZachXBT revealed that Social engineering scams were the leading drivers of scams on the coinbase exchange.
He gave an example of a coinbase user who lost $850,000 to a social engineering scam deceiving the victim into sending funds to a wallet cloned by the hackers.
The Victim was messaged through a spoof email cloning coinbase alerting the victim that his wallet had multiple unauthorized log-ins.
The scammers gained the trust of the victim and got him to transfer his money to a wallet they controlled.
Such Social engineering schemes dominate the coinbase space and have led to a series of losses.
Social engineering scams in crypto exploit human psychology to trick victims into revealing private information, sending funds, or compromising their wallets.
Popular Social Engineering schemes include Pig butchering, Phishing attacks, Rug Pulls, and Impersonation attacks.
Cyvers Security revealed that phishing was the leading cause of scams in the crypto industry in 2024.
Social engineering scams are hard to curtail as the schemes target human error and not necessarily a breach in cyber security.
