- He had downloaded a fake copy of MetaMask
- Hackers drained Cuban's wallet of Lido-staked ETH, stablecoins, ENS
Dallas Mavericks owner and tech billionaire Mark Cuban found himself on the losing end of a digital asset transaction late last week, Decrypt reported. After being inactive for months, he decided to dabble in crypto and fell victim to a scam.
He lost $870,000 in a number of cryptocurrencies even though the transactions had been flagged by blockchain observers. If he had heeded their warnings, he could have moved his assets to safety.
Stablecoins, ETH tokens drained
Cuban held on to his assets on Polygon (MATIC), but hackers drained his wallet of Lido staked ETH, several stablecoins, SuperRare, and Ethereum Name Service tokens.
Twitter user first caught wind of the scam
A Twitter user going by the handle of WazzCrypto was the first to notice that something was fishy. He tweeted:
Did Mark Cuban’s wallet just get drained? Wallet inactive for 160 days and all assets just moved.
The user posted screenshots of crypto wallets connected to the billionaire, which listed a few Ethereum (ETH) transactions. He found those very suspicious.
Later tweets indicated that someone had alerted the entrepreneur of the alleged breach and he moved USDC worth $2 million to Coinbase to keep it safe.
“Someone got me”
DL News got in touch with Cuban about the hack. He responded that someone had “gotten” him for 5 ETH. He suspects he was being watched because he hadn’t visited MetaMask in months.
He downloaded a fake copy of MetaMask
The most likely cause of the incident was a fake copy of MetaMask, a popular crypto wallet that Cuban downloaded. He concedes that what he thought was MetaMask “had shit in it.” This is not the first time a MetaMask user has been harmed in a breach.
He said that after MetaMask crashed a few times and he got the alert, he locked his NFTs on OpenSea and transferred all his MATIC.
The benefits of transparency
Cuban has been an outspoken supporter of NFTs and cryptocurrencies, as well as of blockchain technology in general. The fact that the blockchain is fully transparent saved part of his assets because that’s how sleuths were able to notice something was up.
