Episode 1 – 163 ETH, Gone

Watch and learn from our Chief Tech Officer, Charles Guillemet. Monty Munford is our first guest in this new series, How I Got Hacked.

Script: – I was the victim of a crypto theft to the value of 163 Ether. It’s probably now worth about £450, 000. – [Man #1] My account was hacked. – [Man #2] Somebody stole 21 Bitcoin out of it. – [Reporter #1] $2 million in cryptocurrencies stolen. – [Reporter #2] $47 million dollars– – [Reporter #3] Million dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. – [Woman #1] My heart sank, like, completely sank. – [Man #3] Everything we had was gone. – Bitcoin is rock and roll. This is about changing money. I got into crypto basically because I was speaking at conferences. I have actually never invested money in crypto. I’ve earned it. Well, the story for me is very sad. I knew there were stories about losing your 40-number private key. So, I was quite cautious. So, what I did with my private key is I split it up into 10 lots of four. I put it into Gmail drafts. If I ever needed it, I’d take it out, put it all together, I’d go to my wallet, and then I’d clear my history, because I knew there were bad people out there. So, I wasn’t stupid, I don’t think I was stupid. I probably was stupid, because people could just hijack your computer. In the middle of June 2019, I was bored, nothing else to do, checking my crypto. And I was just checking, you know what I mean? Zero. What? What? Zero, they were all gone. I’ve had the slow dawning… oh no, please, not me. No, no, no, no, not me! And then, after that, I felt sick as a dog. I had lost 163 Ether, it’s probably now worth about £450,000. So, I went to Buynet, which is where the money had gone, and I got an email back saying, “We’ll get back to you in 72 hours”. Mamma mia, right? I want you to get back to me in 72 seconds! Not in 72 hours! Because they might move it. And 72 hours later, I got a message from Buynet saying, “You need to get a police report”. Aaahh! What do the British police know about cryptocurrency? So, I get very emotional about this. To be honest, after that, the police were fantastic. They tried everything they could to get it back for me. A friend of mine had put a tracker on it, and then, about a month after that, it was moved. Disparu… disappeared, you know? Nothing I could do. That was the end of the story. – I’m Charles Guillemet, I’m CTO at Ledger. I’m in charge of technology. Monty did two mistakes, I think. The first one is he decided to digitize his seed phrase. That means that, if an attacker gets access to his Gmail account or to his computer, it’s done. And the second mistake is he was using a software wallet. That means that, if either there is a vulnerability in the software wallet or a malware on his computer, an attacker can get access to his seed. – I am confident I will get it back. Who knows what will happen? That Ether could be worth 10 million. It could be worth zero, who knows? And sometimes I get happy when crypto goes down, because it’s a smaller house I lost.

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