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Crypto.com halts withdrawals after a reported suspicious activity

Crypto exchange platform Crypto.com temporarily suspends withdrawals for 14 hours after several users reported unauthorized activity in their accounts on January 17. Billy Markus, the founder of Dogecoin, initiated the company to shut down transactions after sensing a suspicious pattern on Etherscan. 

‘We have a small number of users reporting suspicious activity on their accounts. We will be pausing withdrawals shortly, as our team is investigating. All funds are safe’, Crypto.com announced on Twitter. 

Although the platform claimed that everyone’s account is safe and no funds were stolen, some users on social media reported otherwise. 

Jewellery maker and crypto influencer Ben Baller announced that about 4.28 Ether, which is equivalent to more than US$13,000, has been stolen out of his account. He also questioned how the cybercriminal bypassed the two-factor authentication, one of the platform’s security measures.

As of writing, it remains unclear how the hackers overhauled Crypto.com’s security and executed the crypto theft. However, according to a blockchain security and data analytics firm Perkshield, approximately US$15,000,000 worth of Ether had been stolen from users’ accounts. The company stated that half of those funds were being laundered through Tornado Cash, an ETH mixer protocol aiming to enhance privacy by obscuring the on-chain link between source and destination address.

Despite these allegations, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek tweeted via his personal account that no customer funds were stolen and the platform’s team has improved the infrastructure in response to the incident. He also announced that they will disclose the full details once the investigation has been completed.  

This is not the first time a cryptocurrency exchange has suffered from alleged hacks and protocol violations. Earlier this month, decentralized finance security platform ImmuneFi published a report regarding the losses in the crypto market over the past year. The company reported that the market has suffered a total loss exceeding US$10,200,000,000 from hacks and other suspicious activities alone.

‘In total, the crypto and DeFi ecosystem has witnessed a staggering loss of $10,210,188,549 in 2021. Most of that was lost in only a few events of alleged fraud, namely with Africrypt, Meerkat, Thodex and Popcornswap, which together have captured over $7,549,958,704 in users’ funds’, the Immunefi report stated.

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