Mark Cuban, billionaire and star of Shark Tank, lost nearly $1 million in a crypto scam earlier this year. The famous entrepreneur and investor explained that he believes he downloaded some malignant software.
Cuban spoke to crypto news outlet DL News about the scam. He reportedly downloaded the popular crypto wallet software MetaMask but accidentally used a dodgy version “with some s— in it.”
“I went on MetaMask for the first time in months. They must have been watching,” he said. Cuban was unaware of the theft until an anonymous Twitter user with the handle WazzCrypto posted that there had been unusual movement from a wallet with the username “Mark Cuban 2.”
“Did Mark Cuban’s wallet just get drained? The wallet was inactive for 160 days, and all assets just moved,” wrote WazzCrypto on September 15. Cuban initially said that he lost five Ethereum in the hack, but it was later discovered that he lost $870,000. Five ETH would have been about $9,000 in September. Cuban lost many assets, including stablecoins and tokens like Lido staked Ether, SuperRare, and Ethereum Name Service. He confirmed to DL News that he did not lose anything else and that all his assets were transferred to Coinbase.
This is not the first time that Cuban has been hacked. As one of the only public figures personally active in DeFi investing, Cuban is, unfortunately, a target for hackers. Like all crypto investors, he has experienced highs and lows. In 2021, Cuban was a liquidity provider for Iron Finance’s TITAN stablecoin. TITAN’s price suddenly crashed to zero in June 2021, and Cuban’s assets were wiped out along with all other investors.
The number of scams has been markedly higher during the current bear market. The MetaMask scam is just one in a series of high-profile hacks. Stake.com, the internet’s largest crypto casino, was drained of $41 million earlier this fall. CoinEx experienced a massive $50 million hack in the same week. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s Twitter account was hacked, and the hacker gathered $700,000 from his followers by posting a phishing link.
While it is unclear exactly how the MetaMask scam infiltrated Cuban’s accounts, the most likely explanation is that the software was a Trojan Horse. Yahoo! Finance speculated that hackers created malware that imitated MetaMask to lure in those looking for the real application. Phishing is also likely, meaning Cuban was tricked into giving hackers his account information from a false link.
Phishing scams have been increasingly common and lucrative over the past few years. Phishing links are sent to people through spam emails or text messages disguised as being from legitimate companies. Common phishing scams send emails and texts designed to appear as though they are from close acquaintances, banks, or even the IRS. In 2022, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 800,994 complaints about hacks, with losses totaling $10.3 billion. Phishing was the number one type of complaint, with over 300,000 incidents.
