Taylor Monahan, a security expert who co-hosts Unchained’s Uneasy Money, said the newest Ledger-related loss reports she has worked on came from owners who panicked and then fell for scams.
Monahan said on the Oct. 14 episode of Uneasy Money, recorded Wednesday, that in the past couple of days “the reports that we’ve been dealing with are not actually Ledger drains” caused by the cellular implant found in devices sold by reseller CryptoBilis.
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Scams Aimed at Worried Owners
Monahan said she has been collecting reports on the incident all week, is “working with Ledger,” and has had help from Trezor, another hardware wallet maker. She did not give a count of the cases she has seen.
She listed the routes she said those losses took: bad Google ads that turn up when people search to install Ledger Live, fake applications, phishing sites, emails meant to frighten owners, and people who phone victims directly. All of these, she said, add to the original losses “just from people panicking.”
“Don’t panic,” she said.
Copycat attempts are circulating. Blockchain security firm SlowMist warned on Oct. 16 of a phishing campaign posing as a Ledger firmware update that uses the incident as bait. In September, Zscaler ThreatLabz described a campaign that ran fraudulent Google ads to steer Ledger users to a fake page asking for their recovery phrases. Neither report tied those campaigns to the cases Monahan described.
Ledger Support wrote in an Oct. 14 post on X that Ledger “will never call you, DM you, or ask for your 24-word recovery phrase.”
How the Implant Worked
Ledger said on Oct. 13 that an unauthorized component inside CryptoBilis wallets read the recovery phrase off the screen and sent it out over a cellular connection. The company has said every confirmed loss involves a device sold through CryptoBilis, and it has not confirmed a total. Blockchain data firm Bitquery counts $102.0 million taken from 324 wallets. Monahan said the affected devices in the reports she has seen were bought between June and early October.
Monahan said she still uses her Ledger and Trezor devices and will be more careful about where she buys them. She keeps her holdings spread across many devices, locations and paper backups, so that no single failure “will completely wipe me out.” Co-host Austin Griffith pointed to multisig setups, in which a hardware wallet is one of several signers and can be replaced if it is lost or leaks.
Related Listen: Uneasy Money: Why Ledger’s Supply Chain Became a Nearly $100M Target
The post Recent Ledger Loss Reports Stem From Panic Scams, Not Tampered Devices, Taylor Monahan Says appeared first on Unchained.