So this Massachusetts family trust beneficiary is emailing actual Coinbase about opening a separate trust account. June 1–2, 2023, two texts roll in pretending to be Coinbase too. He gives up his login anyway. That’s the whole ballgame.
▪️ He shared username, password and other details, handing scammers the keys to both wallets sitting inside his single Coinbase account.
▪️ When the messages hit, the personal wallet plus Victim Trust wallet held 33.7 bitcoin combined — roughly $900,000 at then-prices.
▪️ Investigators followed 11.2 of those coins into a Binance account via transactions made between June 5 and June 15, 2023.
▪️ The deposited bitcoin got swapped fast into monero to hide the trail, while roughly three quarters of that monero walked back out before withdrawal attempts on the rest got blocked.
▪️ Binance froze the account on FBI request, holding 758.55 monero according to court filings.
▪️ DOJ filed civil forfeiture September 28 targeting 110,270 tether Binance moved into government hands August 3, 2026, replacing…
Your phone is the weakest link in your stack, not the hardware wallet you whisper sweet nothings to at night. Login codes, passwords, SMS confirmations — that’s what actually gets robbed. Zero sophistication required. Just patience, timing, and knowing you’re mid-conversation expecting a ping from exchange support. Team impersonation remains king because humans eventually click reply no matter how many warnings are plastered everywhere saying staff never ask for passwords or codes. Ever. Period. Redundant, obvious, yet it still works perfectly. Apparently forever. Apparently indefinitely. Apparently inexplicably resilient. Unstoppable.
💬 «At the time,the wallets combined contained thirty-three point seven bitcoin valued then approximately nine hundred thousand dollars US Of that amount,the Victim Trust coinbase wallet had twenty-eight point five bitcoin.» — FBI Special Agent Connor Jorde
🔮 Two-factor everything still loses to one convincing text sent at exactly the right moment. Classic.
@pixeos
