MoonPay execs allegedly duped in $250K crypto fraud
The post MoonPay execs allegedly duped in $250K crypto fraud appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com. Two top executives of MoonPay, a major cryptocurrency payments company, reportedly became victims of an elaborate online fraud that led to them losing $250,300, a recent filing with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) reads. The filing, filed to recover 40,350 USDT (a stablecoin pegged to the value of the US dollar) that crypto company Tether is currently holding in frozen accounts, refers to the victims only as “Ivan” and “Mouna.” But coverage from crypto outlet NOTUS suggests they are Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and chief executive of MoonPay, and Mouna Ammari Siala, the company’s chief financial officer. The DOJ says that the two executives were scammed into moving funds to an account controlled by an individual they believed was Steve Witkoff, a high-profile US real estate developer and co-chair of President Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. Blockchain data analysis indicates that the USDT was transferred to a wallet associated with Binance. The wallet is associated with Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a Nigerian citizen residing in Lagos. The episode represents an unusual public case in which senior industry players, who had access to advanced crypto tools and security protocols, proved to be as susceptible to what investigators call a fairly simple form of social engineering as the average rank-and-file email user. Scammer employed ‘insulting typo’ to imitate a public figure Unlike other crypto-crimes that rely on hacking or exploiting blockchain vulnerabilities (and perhaps for that reason alone), this scam was executed through deception through discreet email manipulation. The scammers employed bogus email addresses nearly identical to correct ones — substituting a capital “I” for a lowercase “l” in domain names — to deceive their targets. In this situation, emails were sent from [email protected] and [email protected] — addresses spoofing the names of well-known people and events. This practice, called typosquatting, is used frequently in…
The post MoonPay execs allegedly duped in $250K crypto fraud appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Two top executives of MoonPay, a major cryptocurrency payments company, reportedly became victims of an elaborate online fraud that led to them losing $250,300, a recent filing with the US Department of Justice (DOJ) reads. The filing, filed to recover 40,350 USDT (a stablecoin pegged to the value of the US dollar) that crypto company Tether is currently holding in frozen accounts, refers to the victims only as “Ivan” and “Mouna.” But coverage from crypto outlet NOTUS suggests they are Ivan Soto-Wright, co-founder and chief executive of MoonPay, and Mouna Ammari Siala, the company’s chief financial officer. The DOJ says that the two executives were scammed into moving funds to an account controlled by an individual they believed was Steve Witkoff, a high-profile US real estate developer and co-chair of President Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee. Blockchain data analysis indicates that the USDT was transferred to a wallet associated with Binance. The wallet is associated with Ehiremen Aigbokhan, a Nigerian citizen residing in Lagos. The episode represents an unusual public case in which senior industry players, who had access to advanced crypto tools and security protocols, proved to be as susceptible to what investigators call a fairly simple form of social engineering as the average rank-and-file email user. Scammer employed ‘insulting typo’ to imitate a public figure Unlike other crypto-crimes that rely on hacking or exploiting blockchain vulnerabilities (and perhaps for that reason alone), this scam was executed through deception through discreet email manipulation. The scammers employed bogus email addresses nearly identical to correct ones — substituting a capital “I” for a lowercase “l” in domain names — to deceive their targets. In this situation, emails were sent from [email protected] and [email protected] — addresses spoofing the names of well-known people and events. This practice, called typosquatting, is used frequently in…
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