• Using Hologram AI, hackers impersonated the identity of Patrick Hillmann, the Chief Communications Officer (COO) of Binance.
• Hackers managed to steal 25 million BNX tokens native to the Brazilian crypto exchange BlueBenx.

Amid the pretty fast growth of the cryptocurrency market over the last two years, crypto scams have also been on the rise. In one such sophisticated scam, hackers used the deepfake tech to completely drain liquidity from a Brazilian crypto exchange, BlueBenx.

In the case of BlueBenx, the hack was highly sophisticated. Putting a classic example of a deepfake listing scam, a group of hackers leveraged the Hologram AI tech and managed to impersonate Patrick Hillmann, the Chief Communications Officer (COO).

These hackers then used the deepfake tech on Zoom video calls thereby offering crypto projects to be listed on Binance. However, BlueBenx crypto exchange turned out to be the victim of the group. The Brazilian crypto exchange said that they sent our 25 million of BlueBenx native token, BNX, worth $200,000 to the hackers.

These bad actors then swapped these 25 million BNX tokens for Tether stablecoin USDT via exchange pools. Thus, they completely drained the exchange out of liquidity. This further led to BlueBenx immediately suspending withdrawals on the platform.

The Brazilian crypto exchange has said that withdrawals shall resume sometime next year in 2023. BlueBenx also clarified that out of its 25,000 clients only 2,500 have been impacted. In its statement regarding the scam, the crypto exchange noted:

After payment and sending of tokens, security practice and common validation between operations, the false representative of the institution captured the amounts and carried out thousands of liquidity withdrawal transactions in the pools where the company kept its token listed in DeFi, leading to a flow, in minutes, of all liquidity of the assets invested in BlueBenx Finance, including USDT reserve funds.

Rising crypto scams through social platforms

Lately, crypto scams have been spreading fast through social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, etc. These days, the spread of crypto scams has been pretty rampant on LinkedIn.

Since several users use LinkedIn for business networking, they find investment offers on this platform to be legitimate. Earlier in June 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raised a warning of fraudulent investment scams rising on LinkedIn. FBI’s special agent Sean Ragan said:

So the criminals, that’s how they make money, that’s what they focus their time and attention on. And, they are always thinking about different ways to victimize people, victimize companies. And, they spend their time doing their homework, defining their goals and their strategies, and their tools and tactics that they use.

The recent discovery shows that North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group has been posting crypto jobs on LinkedIn to affect users’ devices. Since February 2022, the hackers have been posting open positions at Coinbase.

On the other hand, Coinbase has officially announced that it will lay off some staff due to the crypto winter. These hackers put the job description in a PDF file. If downloaded these files execute the malware on the users’ devices. As per data from Checkpoint, LinkedIn was the top destination for phishing attacks in Q1 2022.