{"id":50470,"date":"2023-02-08T13:30:06","date_gmt":"2023-02-08T13:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/scammers-steal-4-million-in-crypto-during-face-to-face-meeting\/"},"modified":"2023-02-08T13:30:06","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T13:30:06","slug":"scammers-steal-4-million-in-crypto-during-face-to-face-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/scammers-steal-4-million-in-crypto-during-face-to-face-meeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahad Shams, the co-founder of Web3 metaverse gaming engine startup Webaverse, discovered in late November 2022 that someone had stolen $4 million of his cryptocurrency \u2013 during a real world interaction.<\/p>\n

Stolen crypto isn’t unusual: billions of digi-dollars were stolen<\/a> last year, some by crime gangs or nations like North Korea.<\/p>\n

What made this case different is that the scammers stole the funds from a newly created Trust Wallet account when Shams and a Webaverse colleague met in the lobby of a Rome hotel. By the premature end of the meeting, the money \u2013 and the miscreants \u2013 were gone.<\/p>\n

\n

We thought it was weird but no private keys or seed phrases were showing, so we humored them<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a detailed statement<\/a> posted on Twitter this week, Shams outlined how the scammers posed as possible investors, courted him over several weeks, arranged the meeting in Rome, convinced him to shift $4 million in crypto into the new Trust Wallet account, and eventually disappeared, followed by the funds minutes later.<\/p>\n

“We aren’t 100 percent sure as to technically how this happened yet, but in short it involved the scammers convincing us to move funds into a fresh wallet (which we created and controlled) in order to provide ‘proof of funds’,” Shams wrote.<\/p>\n

Not the first victim<\/h3>\n

What he found in the wake of the theft and the following investigation is that such scams, while not typical, are not unheard of. He pointed to a Twitter thread<\/a> from 2021 in which NFT entrepreneur Jacob Riglin, founder of Dream Lab, wrote that $90,000 in crypto was stolen from him in a similar scheme that involved a meeting in Barcelona.<\/p>\n

Also in that case, Riglin was talked into opening his crypto wallet and showing it to the scammers, again to show the “investors” that he had the money to make the deal.<\/p>\n