American entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban has fallen victim to a cryptocurrency scam, losing a substantial sum of digital assets in a recent incident. On the late evening of 15 September 2023, it was discovered that Cuban’s MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet, named ‘Mark Cuban 2’, had been drained of approximately USD 8.7 million.
The discovery was first made by a crypto enthusiast known as Wazz, who noticed that the wallet had remained dormant for over five months. Wazz took to social media, raising concerns over the suspicious activity, which triggered a series of events that led to the revelation of Cuban’s losses.
Cuban, known for his involvement in various business ventures and as a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency space, later confirmed the extent of his losses. He disclosed that the attack had not only resulted in the loss of five Ethereum (ETH) tokens valued at around USD 8,170 at the current market prices but also led to the disappearance of other valuable digital assets. Among the assets lost were USD Coin (USDC), Polygon (MATIC), Lido staked Ethereum (stETH) and tokens from SuperRare and Ethereum Name Service.
However, it wasn’t a complete catastrophe for the billionaire investor. Swift action on his part allowed him to move approximately USD 2 million worth of USDC to Coinbase Custody, effectively preventing the majority of his assets from being pilfered by the scammers.
Cuban believes that his encounter with the fraudulent scheme may have been facilitated by downloading a corrupted version of the MetaMask application, unwittingly granting the scammers access to his wallet. He recounted that his MetaMask app had been behaving erratically, crashing multiple times before the incident occurred.
This isn’t Cuban’s first brush with cryptocurrency-related losses. In a previous incident in 2021, he reportedly suffered financial setbacks when Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin experienced a catastrophic collapse in what was rumored to be a rug pull.
On Sunday, another cryptocurrency-related breach came to light as global cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx disclosed that its hot wallets had been compromised. On 12 September 2023, unauthorised transactions involving Ethereum (ETH), Tron (TRON) and Polygon (MATIC) cryptocurrencies were detected, resulting in the theft of a substantial amount of digital assets used to support the exchange’s operations.
