Billionaire Mark Cuban Loses $870K in Fresh Crypto Scam

It turned out to be a huge mistake for tech billionaire Mark Cuban when he decided to revisit crypto this past weekend. Having been inactive for several months, the Dallas Maverick owner thought it a good idea to look up his holdings, only to fall victim to a crypto scam.

According to blockchain data, he lost around $870,000 worth of tokens to the attack after his wallet was drained of US-pegged stablecoins, staked ETH (stETH), SuperRare (RARE) tokens, and some Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domains.

Speaking with DL News, Cuban hinted that someone must have been monitoring his online activities. But despite his belief, investigations may have revealed that he most likely downloaded a fake or look-alike MetaMask crypto wallet app.

According to @wazzcrypto, the on-chain detective who first spotted them, the transactions were sudden and suspicious after 160 days of inactivity.

Luckily, Cuban was quickly alerted to the compromise and he managed to move over $2.5 million worth of other crypto he had on Polygon to a Coinbase exchange address. He told DL News:

“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.”

Mark Cuban and Other Prominent Individuals Are Being Targeted

It might be worth noting that Mark Cuban is the second high-profile target of a phishing attack in recent weeks. Recall that in early September, Coinspeaker reported the X (formerly Twitter) account of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was hacked.  Although that hack was reportedly a SIM swap attack, the hackers eventually used the account to post phishing links that saw Buterin’s followers lose a cumulative $700,000 worth of tokens.  Although Buterin did not lose his personal funds in the hack, there is no gainsaying that illicit actors are getting more interested in attacking prominent individuals.