• A victim lost 783 BTC, worth around $91.4M, after a fraudster posing as hardware wallet support tricked them into handing over wallet credentials.
  • The stolen funds were routed through Wasabi Wallet, a mixing tool designed to obscure transaction trails.
  • This comes a year after the $243M Genesis creditor theft and amid $3.1B in scams in H1 2025.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has uncovered one of the largest social engineering scams of the year, with a victim losing 783 BTC, worth roughly $91.4 million, after being tricked by a fraudster posing as a hardware wallet support agent.

The attack, which occurred on August 19, began when the scammer impersonated a customer support representative and convinced the target to hand over wallet credentials. Once access was secured, the stolen funds were quickly funneled through Wasabi Wallet, a privacy tool often used to obfuscate Bitcoin transactions.

The incident highlights how human manipulation remains one of the most effective tools in crypto crime, bypassing even the most sophisticated security hardware. Social engineering attacks have surged in recent years, often exploiting victims’ trust in customer service channels.

This breach comes exactly one year after the high-profile Genesis creditor theft, in which $243 million was stolen and later linked to a criminal group that saw 12 individuals arrested in California earlier this year.

The recurrence of such large-scale attacks highlights persistent vulnerabilities in user-side security practices and the sophistication of fraudsters targeting high-value accounts.

According to industry reports, crypto investors lost more than $3.1 billion to hacks and scams in the first half of 2025 alone, making social engineering one of the most damaging vectors for theft. Unlike technical exploits, these scams rely on deceiving individuals into willingly giving away access, making them harder to prevent with traditional cybersecurity measures.

Edited by Harshajit Sarmah