Billionaire Mark Cuban Loses $870,000 In the Latest MetaMask Wallet Hack

Billionaire Mark Cuban has been the victim of the latest hot wallet hack. As per reports, nearly $870,000 has been drained from a MetaMask wallet belonging to the billionaire Mark Cuban.

The initial detection of the hack occurred on September 15th around 8 PM UTC, thanks to the vigilance of independent blockchain investigator @WazzCrypto. They noticed unusual activity associated with one of Cuban’s wallets, which had remained dormant for approximately five months.

Lmao, did Mark Cuban's wallet just get drained?

Wallet inactive for 160 days and all assets just moved pic.twitter.com/vWnMZFyHB5

— Wazz (@WazzCrypto) September 15, 2023

Per Etherscan’s transaction records, there was a rapid withdrawal of various assets, including USD Coin (USDC), Tether (USDT), and Lido Staked Ether (stETH), from the wallet within a brief 10-minute timeframe.

Interestingly, an additional $2 million worth of USDC was subsequently withdrawn and transferred to an alternative wallet. This sequence of transactions has raised suspicions that Mark Cuban might have been orchestrating asset transfers within his portfolio.

Mark Cuban Confirms the Theft

A few hours later, billionaire Mark Cuban himself confirmed to DL News that he logged into MetaMask for the first time in months.

When contacted by DL News, Mark Cuban was initially unaware of the recent wallet activities and subsequently expressed, “Someone got me for 5 ETH.” He explained that he had logged into MetaMask for the first time in months and suspected that someone had been monitoring his actions.

However, Cuban’s losses extended beyond the initial 5 Ether, which is approximately valued at $9,000 at current rates. In total, he incurred losses of approximately $870,000, spread across 10 different cryptocurrencies.

“I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some shit in it,” Cuban told DL News. Cuban said that this hack took place when he went to his account in order to clean it up on his phone. “MetaMask crashed a couple times. I just stopped. Then you emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account,” Cuban said.

Numerous scammers create counterfeit MetaMask extensions or applications, deceiving users into divulging their private keys or seed phrases. Once these malicious individuals gain unauthorized access, they can effortlessly empty users’ cryptocurrency wallets.

Mark Cuban recounted, “Since I was only using the account that was compromised, none of my other accounts were affected.”

Cuban added that he successfully moved the remaining assets to Coinbase using the “dongle” utilized by Coinbase for authentication. The billionaire believes that 99% of crypto tokens shall go broke.