Retiree Claims $3M in XRP Taken in Ellipal Cold Wallet Breach

No more retirement for this person! Guess it’s time to find some work!

perfect example of someone who would have been MUCH BETTER OFF keeping their money in the bank where it is insured. with $4,000,000 he could have split it between about 20 different banks, putting 200 grand in each one. what an idiot!

I have read the article and it seems the hardware wallet company determined the victim had used a hot wallet option instead of using the cold wallet properly, putting his private seed at risk from the very beginning when he created it. Such a blow... This was rather a very minor mistake which escalated to a complete catastrophe as he continued to accumulate money in a hot wallet, without being aware it has a hot one and not a cold one. Sadly, it is very likely this money is gone forever and this man will have to depend on his children or the rest of his immediate family in order to survive the rest of his life together with his wife. Crazy...

I don't wish this to happen on anybody. But I don't understand that people with so much money, they are making mistakes after mistakes and they're not able to keep it as intact as it is. What they should do is to simply keep it in the simplest ways. Because making things complicated and thinking that they have secured it at its best is just making things badly for anyone who does it.

And the thing is that he is not aware of it and might not have been tracking his investments until it's too late. I know it's hard to swallow this as it is huge money and there's no way that he can get it back eventhough they can trace where it went. Just shows that we should really know how to protect our assets and not just put it a wallet and then forget about it. At some point, investors should be technically incline so that they will know what to do and practice safety hygiene.

Yeah, it should be one basic thing to how to protect our assets. Because accumulating that much wealth didn't start from someone who's got it at the top of it already. And so, if it's an accumulated wealth from the start until reaching that amount, he should have given importance or knew more about how to keep it very well. But it's sad that many don't do that as something important because they're confident on how they keep their assets the way they can.

the man is in his early 50s. not a product of the crypto boom. he found out about crypto accidentally in like 2019 while he was on a trip talking to a colleague who just happened to be checking bitcoin's price. at least he did get part of it right by using a hardware wallet or what appears to be one but i'm not so sure... the ellipal wallet they say its an airgapped device and they are even running a HALLOWEEN SPECIAL. special discount i guess. but then there's an app that goes along with this smarphone looking thing. i totally get why he was confused. i am too! i have no idea how it works.

This $3M "cold wallet hack" wasn't actually a cold wallet  . The user had imported the seed into Ellipal's mobile app, which made it a hot wallet. ZachXBT traced the swipe across over 120 swaps and OTC brokers linked to Huione. Ellipal later said it was user error and announced they're discontinuing the app's hot-wallet feature. A wallet is only "cold" if the seed never touches an internet-connected device.

And what others members said, maybe the owner didn't know how to handle it and since he is in 50's might not even know the difference about hot or cold wallet. And thanks to ZachXBT it has been traced. However, the hackers know what he is doing, and so he breaks it down to smaller units and different wallets to make it even harder to follow the trail. And we all know that once your account has been compromised, there's no way that you can get it back.

It's been a few years if that's the case. I think that he should have known more of it because he's got a lot of money in his assets already. Also, the idea of these give aways or discounts, if you've got a lot of assets already you need to be careful with those. But I guess it's not for all of us, I feel sorry about him and there have been a lot of people that have been victimized with the same tactic.

what's the purpose of their mobile app ? does it come with the hardware wallet or are they 2 completely separate things that he should have kept separate in his head. i guess thats the million ( i mean 3 million dollar ) question. i can totally see that guy just typing in his seed phrase straight into his phone without a care in the world...or scanning it from his phone straight into that mobile app however it works i bet he thought he was smart figuring all that out

It is better when hardware wallet makers go for an approach similar to the one used by Trezor or Ledger. No hot wallet options for their application, only a single cold storage option for all their clients, and in the case one needs to move money, one would need to use the airgapped wallet. Simple, straight forwards and no chances for a newbie or elderly to mix up a cold wallet with a hot wallet. no wonder why the company behind all this mess just decided to sunset their hot wallet option. This is already very bad advertisement to them. They dont need something like this happening again to their clients.

this dude that lost all his money he seems pretty chill about it. he said if ellipal would have just sent him a loaded hardware wallet with say $60 on it saying sorry he would have felt alot better. surely they could do that right?

I can't believe that he's that chill despite losing that amount. Maybe that's just part of his entire wealth and he's got more assets somewhere else. I agree that the company can do that easy for him and just say some encouraging words and apologies on what has happened to him and this mess is already solved and they all move on together.

i'm pretty sure that was pretty much his entire life savings because he said he was going to have to go back to work somehow maybe start some type of business. i think he was living off that money making regular withdrawals.