Ethereum

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.

The Blockchain Bandit is an unidentified threat actor or group that systematically exploited Ethereum wallets holding cryptographically weak private keys between approximately 2015 and 2018, accumulating more than 45,000 ETH (worth over $54 million at peak 2018 valuations) through a technique researchers later termed 'Ethercombing.' The actor compromised 732 private keys across 49,060 transactions, draining wallets in near-real-time using automated blockchain monitoring. Dormant since 2018, the actor re-emerged in January 2023 and again in December 2024, consolidating approximately 51,000 ETH (valued at roughly $172 million) into a single multisig wallet, as tracked by on-chain investigator ZachXBT.

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.

Pink Drainer was a pseudonymous wallet-drainer-as-a-service operation that supplied phishing kits and malicious smart-contract infrastructure to affiliate scammers between roughly April 2023 and May 2024. Security researchers, principally Scam Sniffer and blockchain investigator ZachXBT, attribute upward of $75-85 million in stolen crypto assets across an estimated 20,000-21,000+ victims to wallets and infrastructure linked to the group before it announced its retirement in May 2024. No law enforcement agency has publicly identified or charged the individuals behind the operation, so all attributions of activity and identity in this report come from private security researchers rather than courts or regulators.

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.

NFTMachine is the online alias of Tyler Gaye, a Denver, Colorado resident who allegedly orchestrated a presale fraud in early 2021 by raising approximately $500,000 (reportedly 277 ETH from 130+ investors) for a promised NFT marketplace called opeNFT (also stylized ONFT), which was never launched. A Denver District Court judge entered a default judgment of $275,000 against Gaye in November 2022, classifying the conduct as civil theft. On-chain investigator ZachXBT has subsequently alleged Gaye continued launching new crypto projects — including Arcade DAO and Gamegear — under the alias 'scaredofboobs' without satisfying the court-ordered judgment.

The 'WallStreetBets' brand has been exploited in at least two distinct crypto fraud incidents: a 2021 Telegram pre-mine scam using a fake 'WallStreetBets – Crypto Pumps' channel that stole over $2.1 million in BNB and ETH, and a 2023 Ethereum meme token (WSB Coin) that surged to a $50 million market cap before insiders allegedly dumped $635,000 worth of tokens within days of launch, collapsing the price by over 90%. Neither token was authorized by Reddit or the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and ZachXBT publicly identified the alleged perpetrators in the 2023 incident.

Avalanche C-Chain address 0x327a81d0d128db8886d265be73c9fdda97194f30 was flagged by on-chain investigator ZachXBT in June 2024 as the primary launderer for the BTCTurk exchange hack, having transferred approximately 1.96 million AVAX (valued at ~$54.2 million) to Coinbase, Binance, Gate.io, and THORChain. ZachXBT's timing analysis linked subsequent BTC withdrawals of approximately $45.96 million to the same threat actor, who was also allegedly responsible for a concurrent $2.9 million theft from Sportsbet. The address currently holds negligible funds, consistent with successful laundering of proceeds.

Sportsbet.io is a cryptocurrency gambling and sports betting platform operated by mBet Solutions N.V. under the Yolo Group umbrella, licensed in Curaçao. On June 22, 2024, blockchain investigator ZachXBT publicly identified that the platform's hot wallets were drained of approximately $3.5 million in USDT and TRX, attributing the attack to the same threat actor who hours later stole an estimated $55 million from Turkish exchange BtcTurk, with stolen funds allegedly commingled between both hacks. The platform has drawn ongoing scrutiny for operating in regulatory grey markets, serving users in jurisdictions where it holds no local license, and for systemic user complaints involving account closures and fund seizures following wins. Yolo Group founder Tim Heath confirmed in 2025 that the brand is being wound down in favor of fully regulated markets.

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.

Masa (also known as Masa Finance, later rebranded as Gopher) is a Web3 data and identity protocol that launched a soulbound token standard on Ethereum in 2023 before pivoting to a decentralized AI data network. The MASA token, sold via CoinList in March 2024 at $0.079 and hitting an all-time high of approximately $0.4697 on its April 11, 2024 listing date, subsequently collapsed by over 99.9% to trade near $0.00002 by mid-2026. ZachXBT publicly accused the project of concealing a six-figure security exploit in September 2024, which the team later confirmed only after the allegation was made public.

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.

Wasabi Protocol is a decentralized perpetual futures and leveraged trading platform for memecoins and long-tail assets, deployed on Ethereum, Base, Berachain, and Blast. On April 30, 2026, the protocol suffered a critical multi-chain exploit in which a compromised admin deployer key was used to execute malicious UUPS proxy upgrades across core contracts, draining over $5 million in user funds. Security firm BlockSec reported that the attacker's wallets had been funded via Tornado Cash, and on-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly criticized the protocol for single-EOA admin control, absence of a timelock or multisig, and alleged misappropriation of project funds on influencer marketing.

Renzo Protocol is an Ethereum liquid restaking protocol that issues ezETH, serving as an interface to the EigenLayer ecosystem. In April 2024, ezETH suffered a severe depeg event — dropping as low as $700 in under one hour — triggered by an unpopular REZ tokenomics announcement that concentrated approximately 65% of supply with insiders and investors. The event caused over $56 million in DeFi liquidations affecting more than 250 users, and the REZ token has since lost approximately 97% of its all-time high value.

Metawin is an offshore crypto casino and gaming platform licensed under the Anjouan (Comoros) gaming authority, operated by Asobi N.V. from Curacao, and founded by Richard 'Skel' Skelhorn. On November 3, 2024, the platform suffered a significant hot wallet exploit across Ethereum and Solana blockchains resulting in approximately $4 million in stolen funds, with blockchain investigator ZachXBT tracing the stolen assets to KuCoin and a nested HitBTC service across more than 115 attacker-linked addresses. The CEO subsequently claimed to have personally covered the losses, restoring withdrawals for approximately 95% of affected users, though the platform's offshore jurisdictional status and the underlying security vulnerability raise ongoing concerns.

Vitalik Buterin is the legitimate co-founder of Ethereum and is not himself a scam actor. However, his name, likeness, and social media presence constitute one of the most heavily weaponized impersonation surfaces in crypto. Documented threats include a September 2023 SIM-swap of his X account (linked to Pink Drainer, resulting in ~$691K stolen from followers), persistent fake giveaway livestreams on YouTube, thousands of fraudulent Instagram accounts, and an escalating campaign of AI-generated deepfake videos distributing wallet-drainer phishing links.

Tornado Cash is an open-source, non-custodial cryptocurrency mixing protocol on Ethereum, launched in 2019, that obscures the on-chain link between deposit and withdrawal addresses. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the protocol in August 2022 over its alleged use by the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group and other illicit actors to launder billions of dollars; those sanctions were struck down by the Fifth Circuit in November 2024 and formally lifted by OFAC in March 2025. Separately, co-founder Alexey Pertsev was convicted of money laundering in the Netherlands in 2024 (appeal pending), and co-founder Roman Storm was convicted in August 2025 of one count of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business while a New York jury deadlocked on more serious money-laundering and sanctions-violation charges that remain unresolved pending post-trial motions and a possible retrial.

PAAL AI is an Ethereum ERC20 token launched in July 2023, marketed as an AI-powered chatbot and automation ecosystem for crypto communities. In September 2023, blockchain investigator ZachXBT published on-chain evidence and leaked Telegram messages alleging that four prominent crypto influencers — TraderSZ, TraderNJ1, PetaByte, and Trader_XO — received undisclosed token allocations from the PAAL AI team and engaged in a coordinated pump-and-dump scheme, collectively dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in PAAL tokens on retail buyers. The token subsequently declined approximately 98.7% from its March 2024 all-time high of $0.8653 to below $0.013 by mid-2026, while the PAAL brand has also been exploited by third-party wallet-draining scams impersonating its staking platform.

ANDY is a meme token launched on the Base (Ethereum L2) network in 2024, built around the 'boy's club' internet meme character. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT documented a theft of approximately $2 million in ANDY tokens from a victim's wallet in June 2024, with the perpetrator converting roughly half the stolen funds to Ethereum. CertiK's Skynet platform assigned the token a score of 2.7 out of 100, indicating serious security and governance deficiencies. Allegations that individuals associated with the token conducted SIM-swap attacks targeting Korean-American crypto holders have been attributed to ZachXBT's flagging but remain unconfirmed by independently verifiable Tier 1 or Tier 2 sources.

JRNY Crypto (real name allegedly Tony Spark) is a pseudonymous cryptocurrency and NFT influencer operating since 2017, with over 760,000 followers on X and 590,000 YouTube subscribers at peak activity. ZachXBT flagged the account in November 2024 after approximately $4 million in crypto assets were drained from associated wallets in a suspected private key compromise; JRNY did not publicly acknowledge the incident. Separate community-sourced allegations include undisclosed paid promotions, a paid strategic advisory role at BSC launchpad Seedify that critics allege was not consistently disclosed to audiences, and criticism over the JRNY Club and Planet Xolo NFT projects failing to meet roadmap commitments.

Nexera (formerly AllianceBlock) is a blockchain infrastructure protocol focused on compliant real-world asset tokenization, operating primarily on Ethereum. In August 2024, a threat actor later attributed to North Korea's Lazarus Group used social engineering and BeaverTail malware to steal smart contract management credentials, enabling unauthorized transfer of 47.24 million NXRA tokens valued at approximately $1.9 million. The team mitigated further losses by zeroing out and subsequently burning the 32.5 million tokens that remained in the attacker's wallet, limiting confirmed liquidated losses to roughly $449,000.

Kiln is an institutional-grade, non-custodial staking infrastructure provider that manages over $14 billion in staked assets across 50+ proof-of-stake networks, including approximately 6% of the entire Ethereum validator set. In September 2025, Kiln suffered a sophisticated supply chain attack in which a threat actor compromised a GitHub access token belonging to a Kiln infrastructure engineer, injected malicious code into the Kiln Connect API, and caused the theft of approximately 192,600 SOL (~$41 million) from enterprise customer SwissBorg. The incident prompted Kiln to exit all 1.6 million ETH worth of its Ethereum validators as a precautionary measure, triggering the longest Ethereum exit queue backlog in the network's history.

MustStopMurad is the X handle of Murad Mahmudov, a Princeton-educated former Goldman Sachs analyst and co-founder of the now-defunct Adaptive Capital hedge fund, who rose to prominence in 2024 as the primary advocate of the 'memecoin supercycle' thesis following a widely-circulated speech at TOKEN2049 Singapore. On-chain investigator ZachXBT published what he alleged to be 11 wallets linked to Mahmudov in October 2024, holding approximately $24 million in memecoins, raising concerns about undisclosed large holdings in tokens he publicly promotes to hundreds of thousands of followers. No regulatory action has been filed; the core allegations of supply control, potential front-running, and undisclosed conflicts of interest remain contested and unproven in any legal forum.

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.

Rapper Nelly (Cornell Iral Haynes Jr.) is flagged here not as a perpetrator of crypto fraud, but as a victim of an account compromise. In October 2023, an X (formerly Twitter) account associated with Nelly — handle @NellioETH — was hacked by an unknown third party who then used it to run a social engineering phishing campaign against crypto users. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT first identified and publicized the incident; specific amounts stolen from victims and detailed on-chain forensics have not been publicly confirmed.

Pendle is a permissionless yield-trading protocol on Ethereum, launched in 2021 by TN Lee and Vu Nguyen, that allows users to separate and trade the principal and yield components of yield-bearing assets. In September 2024, Penpie — an independent yield optimizer built on top of Pendle — suffered a $27 million reentrancy exploit that was made possible in part by Pendle's permissionless market creation design. Although Pendle's own contracts were not directly exploited, the protocol's architecture contributed to the attack surface, and all 11,261 ETH in stolen funds were subsequently laundered through Tornado Cash.

Bittensor is a decentralized blockchain protocol functioning as a peer-to-peer marketplace for machine intelligence, using the TAO token to reward AI model contributors. In July 2024, the protocol was the target of a supply chain attack via a malicious version of its official PyPI package, resulting in the theft of approximately $28 million in TAO tokens from 32 wallets. A civil lawsuit filed in January 2025 alleges that former Opentensor Foundation employees orchestrated the attack, and on-chain investigator ZachXBT identified a key suspect through NFT wash-trade analysis and Railgun de-mixing.

Compound Finance is one of the earliest and most established decentralized lending protocols on Ethereum, launched in 2018 and governed since 2020 by a DAO around the COMP token. The protocol's smart-contract core has never suffered a direct exploit of user funds, but it has been repeatedly hit by operational and front-end security failures — a costly 2021 token-distribution bug, a 2023 X/Twitter account compromise used for phishing, a 2024 DNS hijack of its website, and a 2024 governance controversy in which a whale-backed group used purchased voting power to pass a treasury allocation over community objections. Combined with declining total value locked and a 2023 leadership departure, these incidents warrant continued scrutiny even though the underlying lending contracts have a long audit history and no reported loss of user deposits from a core-protocol hack.

Ethena is a DeFi protocol founded in 2023 by Guy Young that issues USDe, a synthetic dollar stablecoin backed by delta-neutral perpetual futures hedges on centralized exchanges. The protocol reached $14 billion in supply at its 2025 peak before contracting sharply to approximately $5.9 billion following a flash crash in October 2025 and BaFin's enforcement action that forced Ethena GmbH to cease EU operations. Multiple concerns have been raised including: a German regulatory shutdown citing MiCA breaches and alleged unregistered securities offerings via sUSDe; insider airdrop farming allegations involving 180 million foundation-controlled ENA tokens; two separate security incidents (Discord hack July 2024 and domain registrar compromise September 2024); and structural risks tied to funding rate volatility, exchange counterparty exposure, and an undersized reserve fund relative to protocol TVL.

EigenLayer is a legitimate Ethereum restaking protocol operated by Eigen Labs that became a high-value target for phishing campaigns, wallet drainer attacks, and social engineering in 2024 following the launch of its EIGEN token. In October 2024 alone, the protocol's official X account was compromised to promote a fake airdrop resulting in at least $800,000 lost by one victim, and a separate email-based social engineering attack redirected approximately $5.7 million in locked investor tokens to an attacker's wallet. EIGEN holders and restakers face an elevated and persistent threat surface from impersonation sites, fake airdrop claims, and token-approval drainer schemes that exploit the protocol's name and brand recognition.

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.

Ledger is a France-based manufacturer of hardware cryptocurrency wallets (Nano S, Nano X, Stax, Flex) and maker of the Ledger Live companion app, reportedly securing over $100 billion in client assets across more than 7 million devices sold and preparing a US IPO targeting a valuation above $4 billion. The company has a strong core security record for its hardware products but has been repeatedly implicated in data-handling and supply-chain incidents: a 2020 breach of its own e-commerce/marketing database exposed roughly 1 million emails and 270,000 physical addresses, leading to years of phishing and alleged extortion attempts against customers and an ongoing US class action; a December 2023 npm supply-chain compromise via a former employee's account led to roughly $600,000 in DeFi losses; a May 2023 product announcement ('Ledger Recover') triggered a major trust backlash over perceived key-extraction capability; and in January 2026 a breach at third-party processor Global-e exposed customer order data. Separately, third parties impersonating Ledger — including a fraudulent 'Ledger Live' app that passed Apple App Store review in April 2026 — have caused further customer losses that Ledger did not directly control.

CoinSpot is an Australian cryptocurrency exchange operated by Casey Block Services Pty Ltd, registered with AUSTRAC since 2018 and holding an Australian Financial Services Licence as of 2026. The exchange has no record of regulatory findings of fraud or misconduct against it, but it has been the subject of a November 2023 hot-wallet security breach of roughly $2.4 million, a 2021 phishing campaign that impersonated its emails, and a recurring pattern of user complaints about withdrawal freezes and customer support. CoinSpot's own disclosure of the 2023 breach was minimal, and no attacker has been publicly identified or prosecuted.

CoinsPaid (operating legal entity Dream Finance OÜ, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia) is a business-to-business crypto payment processing platform founded in 2014 by Max Krupyshev and Pavel Kashuba. The company suffered two confirmed external cyberattacks — a $37.3 million theft in July 2023 and a $7.5 million breach in January 2024 — both attributed to third-party attackers with the first definitively linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group by blockchain analysts and the FBI; client funds were reported unaffected in both incidents. The company is currently navigating significant regulatory uncertainty under the EU's MiCA framework after losing its legacy Estonian FIU licence and suspending operations through its Lithuanian entity, while its CASP application in Estonia remains pending as of mid-2026.