Crypto exchange FTX has agreed to compensate victims of last week’s phishing attack with almost $6 million.
The hackers conducted unauthorized trading through some FTX customer accounts. The phishing scam used 3Commas, a trading-bot platform that interlinks with FTX via an application programming interface (API).
Reportedly, the attackers cloned the 3Comma’s website before executing the trades on victim’s accounts, stealing millions of dollars.
The 3Comma alerted against some usual trading activities on 21 October. FTX and the trading-bot platform conducted an investigation since then and suspended the suspicious accounts and disabled compromised keys.
FTX’s Founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried commented on Twitter:
We’ve mostly stamped out sites that try to phish users by masquerading as FTX. But we can’t fix fake sites impersonating *other* services.
A few users accidentally registered at fake other sites, including 3 Commas.
The reimbursement for the phishing scam is a one-time step taken by the exchange, FTX’s Founder highlighted.
He said:
THIS IS A ONE-TIME THING AND WE WILL NOT DO THIS GOING FORWARD. THIS IS NOT A PRECEDENT. We will not [be] making a habit of compensating for uses getting phished by fake versions of other companies!
FTX US recently won the auction for the assets of bankrupt crypto brokerage Voyager Digital Ltd. The acquisition agreement with West Realm Shires Inc. (FTX US) followed a competitive auction process that lasted two weeks.
Experienced writer and journalist, working in the global online trading sector, Steffy is the Editor of LeapRate. She has previous experience as a copywriter and has been with the company since January 2020. Steffy has a British and American Studies degree from St. Kliment Ochridski University in Sofia.
