I have been investing ( wasting ) a lot of time in understanding crypto currency and everything involved with it. Yes by now i know the meaning of HODL, FUD, FOMO etc. Also I ended up creating a facebook group called : TheCoinMill where we help people get started with crypto currency.
Now this ICO is a genuine one with an excellent team and roadmap. They have their sale on 31st January and they have a goal to rise $10,000,000. They earned a good reputation in the market and got around 20,000 members in their official telegram group.
But something terrible happened last night. Hackers hacked their server and they got access to details of all the participants who whitelisted to their ICO.
The Impact
Generally when we take part in ICOs we need to first whitelist our-self where we need to give our name, email ID, password, ETH address where we will receive the tokens, Passport copy etc
When experty’s website got hacked hackers got all the above mentioned details of all participants. Today they started sending mails to all the registered participants where they asked them to send their ETH to a specific address in order to take part in ICO. This address belonged to the Hacker and not Experty. Most of the participants believed it as it looked genuine and everyone started sending ETH to this address.
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email with ETH address sent by the hacker to participants |
In the last 12 hours the address ( hacker’s address ) received almost 108 ETH which is almost $120,000
Hacker’s ETH address : https://etherscan.io/address/0x82744Ba0766bDEe409885C2186c44A4A73b0c97F
This is something we really need to worry about. As ICOs are getting popular, a lot of scammers and hackers are getting into it as it is easy to scam people here. The biggest problem is that all these transactions happens in cryptocurrencies so it is almost impossible to catch the hacker and this is the reason why many scams takes place.
Also Companies doing ICOs should take these things seriously because it is seen that most of the time their sites are not that secure . They aim to get million dollars from ICOs but don’t spend money in security and other stuffs. We have seen during TheKey ICO how they fail to handle traffic during the sale and their website was down for more than 10 hours during the sale. People give away their personal details like copy of passport, phone number etc so if these information are compromised then people might face a lot of trouble in future.