Billionaire Investor Mark Cuban Lost $870,000 dollars stored in a malicious MetaMask hot wallet.
Hot wallets are commonly used by crypto traders, but they are especially vulnerable to phishing scams and social engineering scams. In this case, Mark Cuban had downloaded a malicious MetaMask wallet.
“The sudden movements in a wallet marked on blockchain explorer EtherScan as “Mark Cuban 2″ were first spotted by pseudonymous on-chain sleuth WazzCrypto,” reports DL News, which conducted an extensive interview with Cuban.
“I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some (stuff) in it,” he says. “MetaMask crashed a couple times. I just stopped. Then you emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account,”
At first Cuban believed that someone had only gotten hit for about 5 Etheruem (Eth), however altogether his losses exceeded $870,000.
Mark Cuban is one of the few public supporters of DeFi apps, but this isn’t his first time facing a large loss in the field. Prior to this hack, Cuban provided liquidity for Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin prior to its bank run.
It’s uncommon for a billionaire to fall victim to an everyday scam, but this highlights that anyone can fall victim to a malicious hot wallet. Not only are they vulnerable to various hacking methods, but if you got the wallet through a compromised source, all of your crypto is vulnerable.
If you are going to use a hot wallet, make sure you’re getting it from its official source, and remember that these aren’t an especially secure way to store large amounts of crypto.
You’re always better off using a hard wallet since using a hot wallet leaves you vulnerable and using a brokerage leaves you at risk of the brokerage going bankrupt suddenly, like we’ve seen with FTX, Block Fi, Three Arrows Capital, and an unfortunately long and growing list.