Mark Cuban, who’s known as an American businessman, investor, film producer, and TV personality, fell victim to a crypto scam on September 15. He lost approximately $8,70,000 in this incident.
A crypto investigator called Wazz noticed some strange activity in a MetaMask crypto wallet named ‘Mark Cuban 2’ on EtherScan. This wallet had been inactive for more than five months.
Wazz, who shared this discovery on X (formerly Twitter), said something like, “Did Mark Cuban’s wallet just get emptied? It hadn’t been used for 160 days, and now everything’s been moved.”
The news about this was first reported by DLNews.
Cuban confirmed that he lost around $8,170 worth of five Ethereum (ETH) tokens due to this scam. Additionally, he lost other cryptocurrencies, including USD Coin (USDC), Polygon (MATIC), Lido staked Ethereum (stETH), and tokens from SuperRare and Ethereum Name Service.
Fortunately, Cuban managed to transfer about $2 million USDC from the wallet to Coinbase Custody, saving most of his assets from being stolen.
Cuban suspects that he unwittingly downloaded a malicious version of MetaMask, which led to this hack. He mentioned, “I logged into MetaMask after several months, and they must have been keeping an eye on it.” He also mentioned that his MetaMask app crashed a few times. Following this, he secured his non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on OpenSea and removed all his MATIC from the account.
This isn’t the first time Cuban has experienced losses in the world of cryptocurrencies. In 2021, he faced unspecified losses when Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin crashed due to a rumored rug pull.
In a related incident, the global cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx disclosed that their hot wallets were hacked on September 12. A significant amount of digital assets was stolen, which were crucial for the exchange’s operations. The unauthorized transactions involved cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH), Tron (TRON), and Polygon (MATIC).