DIVERSION/ I'm in the Epstein files, says Gjati in an attempt to divert attention from the theft!

 Kliko këtu për të tjera
Voxpress:

$3.4 billion stolen and no one can do anything: the dark side of cryptocurrencies that is hitting individuals

2026-01-19 10:03:58Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

There's something particularly painful about stealing cryptocurrency. All transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, known as a "blockchain," so even if someone takes the money and puts it in their crypto wallet, it remains visible online.

“You see your money there on the public blockchain, but there's nothing you can do to get it back,” says Helen, who lost about $315,000 to thieves.

She says that this is like seeing a thief hoarding your most precious belongings on the other side of an impassable abyss.

For seven years, Helen and her husband Richard (not his real name), both residents of the United Kingdom, had been buying and hoarding crypto coins called Cardano.

They liked the idea of ??investing in a digital asset that had the potential to grow significantly in value, as opposed to saving in more traditional ways. They knew it was riskier, but they were careful to keep their digital keys safe.

But somehow, hackers managed to access their cloud storage account, where they kept information about their crypto wallets and how to access them.

In February 2024, after a small test transfer, the criminals sent all of the couple's coins to their digital wallets, in a quick and silent attack.

The couple then watched for months as their money moved from one wallet to another, without being able to do anything about it. (The inherent paradox of cryptocurrencies is that all transactions are publicly traceable, but users can remain publicly untraceable if they choose.)

Helen and Richard are not rich. She is a personal assistant, he is a composer, and they had high hopes for their investment in Cardano.

“We had been buying these coins for so long… We used every penny we could find to buy more,” Richard says. “Apart from my parents dying, this theft is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Since then, Helen has been on a mission to recover their money. She secured detailed reports from various police forces and Cardano developers. Now, even though she has the criminals’ wallet addresses, there is nothing anyone can do to track them down.

Their plan is to save enough to hire private investigators to try to track down the hackers.

“It leaves me with a feeling of helplessness,” she says, “but I will keep trying.”

An explosion of crime in crypto

A survey conducted for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in August 2024 suggested that around 12% of British adults owned crypto assets, equivalent to around seven million people.

Globally, an estimated 560 million people now own cryptocurrencies. But as ownership has increased, so has theft. The pandemic has brought a huge spike in the value of cryptocurrencies and, with it, an explosion of attacks on the industry.

2025 was another very productive year for crypto criminals, with total thefts reaching over $3.4 billion, according to investigators at blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. That annual figure has remained roughly the same since 2020.

Most of the money is stolen in massive cyberattacks on crypto companies. For example, North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit in February 2025.

The losses in this case, and in the vast majority of other cases, are covered by large crypto companies, with little impact on individuals. But 2025 also saw an increase in the number of attacks on individual crypto investors.

Chainalysis research says these individual attacks increased from 40,000 in 2022 to 80,000 last year.

Hacking, defrauding, or extorting individuals accounted for about 20% of the total value of stolen cryptocurrencies, estimated at $713 million.

But the company adds that the number could be much higher, as not all victims choose to report thefts publicly. When that happens, you can be left completely alone.

Many thefts or frauds in traditional finance are covered by banks or card companies. In the UK you can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service and may be able to get compensation from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

“Cryptocurrencies remain largely unregulated in the UK and high risk,” the FCA says. “If something goes wrong, there is little protection, so you should be prepared to lose all your money.”

A stark reminder of this comes if you search online for “Binance account hacked.” Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange with around 1.4 million users in the United Kingdom, but the company’s website offering advice to victims of the theft is blocked in the country.

The company has not accepted new customers in the UK since 2023 because it is not authorised by the FCA to operate. However, criminals do not care where their victims are located and people are being targeted indiscriminately all over the world.

Chainalysis has described these attacks on individuals as the “undocumented frontier of crypto crime.”

According to them, the volume of crimes is related to the number of people entering the crypto world as investors, while the value of the coins has increased, and they argue that improved security practices in major services may have pushed "attackers towards individuals perceived as easier targets."

Then there's the fact that the more crypto you hold and the more public you are about it, the more likely you are to become a target, with small holders (or "hodlers", as the community calls them) being affected much less often.

Burglary, robbery and "jackknife attacks"

As for thieves, they can be anywhere.

In October, blockchain researchers from Elliptic, a crypto analytics company, warned that North Korean state-sponsored hackers are increasingly targeting wealthy cryptocurrency owners. There are also many new scammers and hackers from other countries.

In December in the US, 22-year-old Evan Tangeman pleaded guilty to participating in a group of crypto thieves calling themselves Social Engineering Enterprise, accused of stealing more than $260 million (£194 million) between October 2023 and May 2025.

Prosecutors allege they targeted the crypto rich using hacked databases, tricking victims into believing they were cryptocurrency exchanges and convincing them to transfer the coins.

The gang members, all young men mainly in the US, reportedly spent the stolen coins on private jets, expensive cars and luxury handbags that they gave away at nightclubs.

In some cases, prosecutors say, the gang also organized forced entry into homes to steal devices containing crypto deposit keys.

Burglary and robbery have become so common that they now have a term in the crypto community, “wrench attacks,” so-called because criminals have been known to threaten victims with wrenches.

Last April, crypto criminals in Spain tried to force a man and a woman to hand over their cryptocurrencies.

Spanish police said the man was shot in the leg and he, along with his partner, were held hostage for several hours while the criminals tried to access their crypto wallets. The woman was eventually released, but her partner remained missing, and his body was later found in a wooded area.

Five people were arrested in Spain in connection with the case, while four others were charged in Denmark.

There have been several similar cases in France, including one where an attempted kidnapping was filmed.

Another case in early 2025 saw David Balland, co-founder of Ledger, a crypto security company, kidnapped along with his wife from their home in central France.

Days later, the police rescued them, but Balland's finger was cut off during the extortion attempt.

Then, last month, British police arrested six people after masked men stopped a car traveling between Oxford and London and forced one of the passengers to transfer 1.5 million pounds worth of cryptocurrencies.

Phil Ariss, UK director of Public Sector Relations at blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, has previously said that criminal groups that were already comfortable using violence to achieve their goals would always move on to cryptocurrencies.

“As long as there is a viable path to launder or monetize stolen assets, it matters little to the perpetrator whether the target is a high-value watch or a crypto wallet.

“Cryptocurrencies are now fully part of the mainstream and, as a result, our traditional understanding of physical threat and extortion must evolve accordingly.”

It's difficult to determine exactly how widespread "keyhole attacks" are, as few are publicly reported. But it appears that these types of thefts make up a small part of the growing problem of personal cryptocurrency theft.

Many criminals rely on proven hacking or fraud techniques, which are becoming easier thanks to the abundance of data stolen in major cyberattacks on companies.

"Bitcoin millionaires are becoming more common"

“Data is a common problem, as Bitcoin millionaires are becoming more common and stolen databases are constantly enriching the list of targets,” says Matthew Jones, founder of Haven, a crypto security company.

A data breach at Kering, the parent company of luxury brands such as Gucci and Balenciaga, is a typical example, according to a hacker interviewed by the BBC.

In addition to millions of customer names and contact details, the databases also show how much money people had spent in stores.

The hacker the BBC spoke to says he bought these signs for $300,000 to target the biggest spenders.

He claims he used this information, along with details from another stolen database, to defraud several Coinbase users and get them at least $1.5 million in crypto.

The criminal provided evidence that he was in possession of the stolen data and told the BBC that he owned $700,000 in Bitcoin, which he said came from a victim.

"I buy hacked databases and compare them to others to find rich people and updated phone numbers and emails. I'm still going on the list and I tripled my money very quickly," he claimed.

The hacker did not provide any details about himself, other than the fact that he is a student at an American university.

When asked if he considered himself a hacker or a fraudster, he said: "Neither, I'm only interested in making money."

Kering did not respond to a request for comment on the matter, but previously told the BBC that its IT systems had been secured following the data breach and stressed that no bank account numbers, credit card information or national identification numbers were stolen in the attack.

Matthew Jones of Haven says he himself has had his cryptocurrencies stolen, and the experience prompted him to develop a crypto wallet with additional security features.

Features like continuous biometric verification to ensure only the owner can send coins, and “geofencing” to block any transactions outside of one’s home or workplace, are now necessary, he says. He is also building a panic button into the digital wallet.

“People today are walking around with millions of dollars in crypto, and wallets have no ceiling on how much they can hold, or how much can be stolen at once,” he says.

Being "your own bank"

Matthew Jones' crypto portfolio is based on what the industry calls "self-custody."

Haven's app is similar to Metamask and Trustwallet. Other companies like Trezor and Ledger offer physical devices like USB sticks, but the idea is the same: you can be your own bank.

But with this additional freedom comes additional risk, as you have no protection.

If your coins are stolen from your self-storage wallet, you don't even have the option to complain to a crypto exchange.

Asked whether the freedom of "being your own bank" outweighs the increased risk, Jones insists it does.

“Banks are not truly responsive to their customers and have the power to freeze or close your account based on broad, often vague reasons,” he argues.

He also says he was annoyed that traditional financial institutions asked him why he was transferring money from an account.

Helen and Richard lost all their coins after choosing to be their own bank. What made this particularly painful was that a large portion of the money came from the sale of Richard's mother's house after her death.

“My mother’s money was gone,” says Richard. “Everything she had worked so hard to build my future was stolen. We had to sell our musical instruments and our car, and for a short time we were homeless.”

However, they are not giving up on cryptocurrencies completely. If they manage to get their lost money back, or accumulate enough savings, they plan to immediately return to crypto investments./ BBC


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

Video

SHIKO KANALIN NE YOUTUBE
×