Retired Artist Lost Over $2 Million to Fake Scam on This Crypto Exchange!

Jakarta, Pintu News – A retired artist named Ed Suman recently fell victim to a scam that resulted in the loss of over $2 million worth of crypto assets. It all started with a text message that appeared to be from Coinbase, warning of suspicious activity on his account.

The scam involves a person claiming to be a Coinbase security officer and utilizing data that may have been obtained from a recent customer support breach at the exchange.

Check out the full information here!

The Beginning of Fraud

Ed Suman, aged 67, was contacted via text message warning him of suspicious activity on his Coinbase account. A man claiming to be Brett Miller, a Coinbase security officer, immediately contacted Suman and informed him that his funds were at risk despite being stored in a hardware wallet.

Miller assured Suman that the Trezor Model One used could still be threatened. These fraud schemes often use doubts about security to encourage victims to do things they don’t want to.

Suman was guided to perform a so-called “security check,” which involved entering her seed phrase into a fake website designed similarly to Coinbase’s interface.

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Fraud Continues

Nine days after the first incident, another scammer contacted Suman, claiming that the previous fix had not worked and asking Suman to repeat the process. As a result, all of Suman’s crypto assets, which included 17.5 Bitcoin (BTC) and 225 Ethereum (ETH), vanished.

The value of these assets is now more than $2 million. Suman, who has spent nearly two decades working on large-scale artworks before turning to crypto investments in 2017, has kept his assets in cold storage to avoid the risks associated with exchanges.

The scammers’ ability to refer to details such as wallet type and Suman’s ownership raises serious questions about how they obtained the data.

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Data Leaks and Their Impact

The attack on Suman appears to be one of many incidents that occurred in the wake of a wider data breach at Coinbase. Coinbase confirmed that the breach occurred not due to technical exploits, but through social engineering. The criminals allegedly bribed a third-party support contractor in India to leak sensitive customer information.

Coinbase detected the intrusion through internal monitoring, however signs suggest that it may have started as early as January, several months before it was disclosed. In addition, the attackers reportedly tried to blackmail Coinbase for $20 million in exchange for not divulging the stolen data, a demand the company rejected.

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Reference

• Crypto News. Coinbase Impersonators Steal Over $2M in BTC and ETH from Retired Artist. Accessed on May 20, 2025
• Featured Image: Generated by AI