American businessman and billionaire investor Mark Cuban allegedly lost more than $870,000 in crypto after following a phishing link. Cuban is popularly known as one of the “sharks” on the ABC’s TV series Shark Tank and the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

The hack was uncovered by a blockchain analyst who posted screenshots of suspicious behaviour. He took to X (formerly Twitter) after he noticed the sudden transfers from Cuban’s wallet tagged ‘Mark Cuban 2’ and shared a thread of all the transactions. He pointed out that the wallet had been inactive for 160 days.

What Really Happened With Cuban’s Crypto Assets?

Mark Cuban mentioned that he fell for this scam over the weekend after he accidentally downloaded a fake version of MetaMask on Google. This gave hackers access to his crypto assets amounting to 5 Ether. 

The interesting thing about this incident was that he was searching for Circle, that is a stablecoin provider, when the link popped up. He suspects that this had been a targeted phishing attack, and his perpetrators were monitoring him. 

Following the attack, he moved his remaining tokens to a Coinbase account and enabled two-factor authentication. He added that since he was working on this wallet at that time, it was the only account that lost funds. 

Apart from the 5 Ether which is worth about $8,000 as at the time of this report, the scammers moved other tokens. They took staked ETH, RARE tokens, US-dollar stablecoins and others (up to 10 coins) leading to nearly a $1M loss!

Final Words

Crypto scams are not uncommon in the blockchain space, and Mark Cuban is not the only billionaire that has fallen victim. Earlier this month, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum and one of the must-follow influencers, was hacked. The scammers made away with $700,000. 

The decentralized nature of blockchain and nature of some attacks make it difficult to trace the perpetrators, prosecute them, and recover assets. We hope that as blockchain technology advances, new ways to recover lost or stolen assets will be developed as well.