- A single social engineering attack on Jan. 10, 2026 drained roughly $282 million in Bitcoin and Litecoin.
- The attacker obtained the victim’s hardware-wallet seed phrase and moved 1,459 BTC (≈ $139 million) and 2.05M LTC (≈ $153 million) across multiple blockchains.
- Large portions were converted into Monero (XMR) via instant exchanges, briefly pushing up XMR’s price.
- The attacker used THORChain to bridge stolen BTC across Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin to obscure the trail.
- Security firm ZeroShadow traced the flow in real time and froze about $700,000 within ~20 minutes.
On Jan. 10, 2026 at about 11:00 pm UTC, a crypto holder was tricked into revealing a hardware-wallet seed phrase and had their funds emptied, according to ZachXBT as noted here. The attacker withdrew 1,459 Bitcoin (about $139 million) and 2.05 million Litecoin (about $153 million), totaling roughly $282 million, then began moving assets rapidly across networks.
The thief immediately converted large amounts into privacy coin Monero (XMR) using several instant exchanges, which triggered a short-lived spike in XMR’s price. At the same time, sizable Bitcoin holdings were bridged into Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin via THORChain, allowing cross-chain transfers without centralized exchanges; users publicly criticized THORChain for enabling the shifts, as shown here.
Security firm ZeroShadow said it was alerted by blockchain monitoring teams and traced portions of the stolen flow in real time, freezing about $700,000 before those funds could be fully swapped into privacy assets; their post is available here. ZeroShadow also identified the address as, in their words, “belonging to an individual who had been tricked into sharing their seed phrase by an actor impersonating Trezor ‘Value Wallet’ support.”
Investigators rejected suggestions of state-sponsored involvement; ZachXBT wrote “It’s not North Korea,” regarding attribution. A separate incident last year saw an elderly U.S. holder lose about $330 million in Bitcoin after a similar social engineering scam; much of that case’s BTC was quickly laundered via peel chains and instant exchanges into Monero. Read the editorial policy here.
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