CoinCheck parent company Monex has issued a press release, January 29, 2018, warning users about an ongoing impersonator scam that targets newer users of their platform.
Stark Warning
Back in April 2018, CoinCheck, a Cryptocurrency exchange, suffered a that led to the loss of over $530 million. The hack occurred when the perpetrators were able to get the keys for the exchange’s hot wallet and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of NEM tokens.
Since then, the exchange has been by the Monex Group for $33.5 million and is working on victims of the hack. As part of its acquisition by Monex, CoinCheck was able to an exchange license in Japan and has since resumed activities.
However, they now face a new challenge as some of their customers are being targeted by a group of impersonators forcing Monex to an official statement to warn them.
Details About the Scam
In Monex’s official statement, they went into some detail about the ongoing scam. According to them, the Scam targets newer customers and involves the customer receiving a call from someone claiming to be “Monex Coin Management.”
The customer is also directed to place a call to an automated trading system that is supposedly linked to Monex, the firm has, however, openly stated that they are not connected to any such trading system.
Monex wrote:
“The Monex Group and (subsidiaries) do not have any relation with the above company,”
The purpose of this scam is to gain access to users’ hot wallets and steal their funds. Unfortunately, the use of impersonation of an individual or firm in order to target crypto users isn’t uncommon. On social media sites such as Twitter, a number of scammers impersonate public figures such as in order to gain the trust of users and scam them.
This is reminiscent of the calls that have been taken place for years and whilst most of the general public has been sensitized to these forms of scams, the crypto industry is relatively new and some users, particularly the newer ones, are not as aware.
It has been barely a year since the unfortunate hack and CoinCheck is clearly trying to avoid any more situations of customer funds going missing.
Published at Tue, 29 Jan 2019 21:00:58 +0000