Reports are pouring in that MyBtgWallet has stolen up to 300 Bitcoins along with newly minted BTG rewards. Hence, more than $3 million has been lost in Bitcoin Gold wallet scam. What else do we know?
23 November, AtoZForex - Bitcoin users have lost over $3.3 million through a scam involving the new cryptocurrency Bitcoin Gold (BTG) digital wallet.
Bitcoin Gold wallet scam
More than 3,200 custom wallets were plundered by cyber-criminals due to the vulnerabilities of the BTG website wallet Mybtgwallet.com.
According to reports, users lost funds by providing their private keys to Mybtgwallet.com in order to generate Bitcoin gold wallets. However, the cryptocurrency in their wallets was sent to different addresses instead. At least $30,000 in Ethereum, $72,000 in Litecoin, $107,000 in Bitcoin gold and more than $3 million in Bitcoin were confiscated, according to the online reports.
A victim, Mikel Martin explained:
"I reached this site by following the link at bitcoingold.org official website so I trusted it. I noticed both my BTC and BTG stored in that wallet were gone."
Another user Uejji described:
"So, to summarize, every time someone entered their mnemonic seed into Mybtgwallet.com, their mnemonic was Base64 encoded, stored on the website cookie and then transmitted to Google, where the scammer was free to decode it and have full access to that person's private keys derived from that seed."
Bitcoin Gold team promised investigation to users
The probable loss from sending private keys to Mybtgwallet is estimated at around $550,000. Meanwhile, users believe the BTG team did not intentionally include the compromised wallet. But it was merely careless to list it on the official site. Indeed, the Bitcoin Gold team attracted a third party to develop a suitable ecosystem in the form of the electronic wallet. The code was the work of a developer named John Dass.
Later, the team Bitcoin Gold made a statement not associating with the developer, noting that it was not responsible for the actions of Dass. The loss of funds happened last week, just a day after the main net was launched for Bitcoin Gold.
Soon afterward, the team withdrew its recommendations for the wallet, which was initially pronounced safe on the channel. The BTG team then prompted users to report the losses and promised the further investigation.
Think we missed something? Share your opinion with us in the comments section.