bitcoin

Malone Lam Yu Xuan (born July 19, 2004), a Singaporean national residing in Miami and Los Angeles, is the alleged ringleader of a crypto theft and money laundering enterprise responsible for stealing over $263 million across multiple victims between 2023 and 2025. He was arrested by the FBI on September 18, 2024, and faces RICO conspiracy charges in what prosecutors describe as the first Bitcoin-related RICO prosecution in U.S. history. As of early 2026, he remains in pretrial detention while negotiating a plea deal.

BlackSuit is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation that emerged in May 2023 as a rebranding of the Royal ransomware gang, itself a successor to the Conti cybercrime syndicate believed to be operated by Russian-speaking threat actors. The group employed double-extortion tactics across critical infrastructure sectors including healthcare, automotive, education, and government, compromising over 450 U.S. victims and demanding more than $500 million in ransom, primarily in Bitcoin, before international law enforcement dismantled its infrastructure in July 2025 under Operation Checkmate.

Fake Ledger Live apps are malicious wallet impersonation applications distributed through official app stores — including the Microsoft Store and Apple App Store — that harvest cryptocurrency seed phrases to drain victims' wallets. Two major documented incidents have resulted in confirmed losses of at least $10.3 million: approximately $768,000 via the Microsoft Store in November 2023, and approximately $9.5 million via the Apple App Store in April 2026. Parallel macOS malware campaigns distributing trojanized DMG installers have been active since at least August 2024, with four concurrent active campaigns identified by security researchers.

Bitforex was a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2017, registered in Seychelles and operating under a Hong Kong address, which collapsed in February 2024 after approximately $56.5 million was drained from its hot wallets across Ethereum, Tron, and Bitcoin in a controlled fund extraction widely characterized as an exit scam. The exchange had a documented history of wash trading allegations dating to 2018, a prior unexplained withdrawal freeze in 2022, regulatory warnings from Japan's FSA and Hong Kong's SFC, and operated without a license in the jurisdictions it claimed as home. Following the collapse, team members were allegedly detained by Jiangsu Province police in China, and the exchange briefly reopened for KYC-verified withdrawals in July 2024 before announcing permanent closure.

C&M Software (also styled CMSW) is a Brazilian financial technology company authorized by the Banco Central do Brasil to provide connectivity between smaller financial institutions and Brazil's national payment infrastructure, including the PIX instant-payment system. On June 30, 2025, hackers exploited credentials sold by an insider employee to drain approximately R$800 million (roughly USD 140–148 million) from reserve accounts of at least six financial institutions, in what became Brazil's largest recorded banking cyberattack. A portion of the stolen funds—estimated at USD 30–40 million—was subsequently laundered through Latin American OTC desks and crypto exchanges using Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether USDT, with on-chain investigator ZachXBT playing a central role in tracing and partially freezing the laundered assets.

LastPass is a widely used password manager that suffered a catastrophic two-stage data breach in 2022, resulting in the theft of encrypted customer password vaults containing cryptocurrency seed phrases and private keys. Threat actors subsequently cracked these vaults offline over the following years, draining crypto wallets in waves totaling more than $438 million across hundreds of victims by late 2025. The breach has led to a £1.2 million UK ICO regulatory fine, a $24.45 million US class action settlement, US federal seizures, and on-chain attribution by TRM Labs and blockchain researcher ZachXBT to Russian cybercriminal infrastructure.

Garden Finance is a cross-chain Bitcoin bridge protocol launched in 2023 by former Ren Protocol developers, using Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) and an intents-based solver network to enable atomic swaps across Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Base, and other chains. On October 30–31, 2025, one of its largest solver operators was compromised via a leaked private key, resulting in approximately $11.4 million in stolen assets that were subsequently laundered through Tornado Cash. Prior to the exploit, blockchain investigator ZachXBT alleged that over 80% of the protocol's recent fee revenue was derived from laundering funds stolen in the February 2025 Bybit hack, which the Lazarus Group (DPRK) perpetrated for approximately $1.4 billion.

Noones is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform targeting Africa and the Global South, founded and initially led by Ray Youssef, co-founder of the now-defunct Paxful. In January 2025, the platform suffered an $8 million hot-wallet exploit that was concealed for nearly three weeks before on-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly exposed the breach. Compounding platform risk, Youssef was subsequently indicted by the DOJ in early 2026 on federal AML charges stemming from his leadership of Paxful, and stepped down as Noones CEO shortly thereafter.

Bitcoin Depot was once the largest Bitcoin ATM operator in North America, operating more than 9,000 kiosks before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 18, 2026. The company faces lawsuits from the attorneys general of Iowa and Massachusetts alleging it knowingly facilitated crypto scams, with one state finding that more than 80% of high-value transactions at its kiosks were linked to fraud. Multiple data breaches, a $3.6 million wallet theft, regulatory enforcement in California, and on-chain evidence flagged by ZachXBT further document systemic compliance and security failures.

1EU2pMence1UfifCco2UHJCdoqorAtpT7 is a legacy P2PKH Bitcoin address holding approximately 9,999.99 BTC that has never had any outgoing transactions, marking it as a dormant high-value wallet. The address has been publicly circulated in attacker-community repositories as a brute-force cracking target, appearing in GitHub issue lists of 'rich wallet addresses for BTC crack' alongside automated key-collision tools. No verifiable private-key compromise or confirmed theft has been documented as of the investigation date; however, the address's inclusion in brute-force tooling databases and its indexing on privatekeys.pw elevates its risk profile considerably.

Crypto.com is a Singapore-headquartered centralized cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2016 (originally as Monaco) by Kris Marszalek, Bobby Bao, Gary Or, and Rafael Melo. The platform has been subject to multiple serious security incidents, including a confirmed January 2022 hack in which $34 million was stolen via a 2FA bypass and laundered through Tornado Cash, and an alleged 2023 data breach linked to the Scattered Spider hacking group that the company did not publicly disclose to affected users. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has publicly accused Crypto.com of governance manipulation and tokenomics fraud, citing the March 2025 reissuance of 70 billion CRO tokens that had been permanently burned in 2021, and the company's controversial 2020 forced swap from its original MCO token to CRO at unfavorable rates.

Strike (operated by Zap Solutions, Inc.) is a Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments application founded by Jack Mallers. The platform has faced scrutiny over a 2023 data breach it initially denied, the use of Tether (USDT) as a backing for purported USD cash balances for non-US users, and a 2026 proposed merger with Twenty One Capital (XXI) that raises serious conflict-of-interest concerns given Mallers serves as CEO of both entities.

M2 is a UAE-based cryptocurrency exchange licensed by the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) Financial Services Regulatory Authority, operating as a regulated Multilateral Trading Facility and custodian since late 2023. On October 31, 2024, the exchange suffered a $13.7 million hot wallet breach attributed to an access control vulnerability across the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana networks. M2 subsequently reimbursed all affected customers from its own assets and stated it had engaged law enforcement and regulatory authorities.

CoinSpot is an Australian cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2013 by Russell Wilson and headquartered in Melbourne. It is registered with AUSTRAC as a Digital Currency Exchange (since May 2018) and holds ISO 27001 certification. On November 8, 2023, the platform suffered a suspected private key compromise resulting in the loss of approximately 1,283 ETH (~$2.4 million USD), with stolen funds bridged to Bitcoin via THORChain and Wan Bridge. No customer funds were reported lost in the incident.