South Korean Police Accidentally Post Cryptocurrency Wallet Password
Stay on top of this story
Follow the names and topics behind it.
Add this story's key topics to your watchlist so LyscoNews can highlight related developments and future matches.
Create a free account to sync your watchlist, saved stories, and alerts across devices.
Quick Summary
An expensive mistake:
Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet. The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at 124 high-value tax evaders that resulted in confiscating digital assets worth 8.1 billion won (currently approximately $5.6 million). When announcing the success of the operation, the agency released photos of a Ledger device, a popular hardware wallet for crypto storage and management. However, the images also showed a handwritten note of the wallet recovery phrase, which serves as the master key that allows restoring the assets to another device. The authorities failed to redact that info, allowing anyone to transfer into their account the assets in the cold wallet. Reportedly, shortly after the press release was published, 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens, worth approximately $4.8 million at the time, were transferred out of the confiscated wallet to a new address.