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If you had any significant assets on Coinbase at any time prior to this breach, spear phishing is the least of your worries. Coinbase not only leaked your full
by panarky 1y ago
If you had any significant assets on Coinbase at any time prior to this breach, spear phishing is the least of your worries.
Coinbase not only leaked your full name and address, they also gave up your balances, your transaction history, and images of your government identification.
People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom.
"Significant" in this case can be $10k or less.
Until now, your best defense secrecy. Never talk about crypto in public in any way that could be traced to your real-world identity.
Thanks to Coinbase that defense is now gone.
The bad guys can see who has ever had a significant balance on Coinbase (even if they don't right now), whether that balance was sold for cash and how much, or if you've ever transferred tokens off the exchange to a self-custody wallet.
Now the bad guys know who's worth kidnapping for ransom and where you live. For most people, a Google search of your name and home address turns up the names of family members who would would also be lucrative targets for kidnapping and threats of violence.
Coinbase will never be forced to reimburse all the damage they've done because the true cost would bankrupt the company.
- krunck 1y agoBut hey, at least by being forced to give crypto exchanges all our personal details we're all super protected from the four horsemen: money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tsimionescu 1y agoI think that the right lesson to learn here is not "I should store my money with a company I can't trust not to advertise where I live, but without telling them where I live ".
- nradov 1y agoNo one is forced to use a "crypto exchange" in the first place.
- throwaway290 1y agoor cryptocurrencies
- zamadatix 1y ago> People with "significant" crypto balances are being assaulted on the street and in their own homes, and family members are being kidnapped for ransom. "Significant" in this case can be $10k or less. I wonder why, select a person completely at random and by median you'll get just as much from what they have sitting in their checking account. Select a nicer area for an order of magnitude more. That's not encouragement to go assault people in their homes or kidnap families... just confusion.
- Balgair 1y agoYeah, but banks and the normie monetary system has a lot more safeguards in it when it comes to account transfers. Or at least, they appear to have them. Crypto? It's wild, and people think it's wild.
- cyanydeez 1y agoof course, you need to point out that Crypto has ended up being indistinguishable from the banking system in all the important parts. The distinguishing parts are things you don't want: easily corrupted, grifted, cheated and otherwise duped.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI tried to use Coinbase a few months ago to pay for something, and I couldn't even make a transaction because it was deemed suspicious, and my account got locked or something.
- rsynnott 1y agoSomeone with a lot of cryptocurrency in Coinbase is also quite likely (at least relative to the average person) to have lots of on-chain cryptocurrency, too, though.
- suzzer99 1y agoThe median person does not have $10k sitting in a checking account that they can easily withdraw. My gut feeling is that the threat of kidnapping is a lot more serious in some countries. The US maybe not so much.
- suzzer99 1y agoFlorida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-teens-kidnap-las-vegas-200918594.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-teens-kidnap-las-vegas-20...
- kmfrk 1y agoSeems to be a whole thing in France too: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/04/french-police-investigate-spate-of-cryptocurrency-millionaire-kidnappings https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/04/french-police-....
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- toomim 1y agoAnd this crypto CEO in Toronto was kidnapped for a $1M ransom: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/kidnapping-toronto-businessman-cryptocurrency-1.7376679 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/kidnapping-toronto-bu...
- stonogo 1y agoThe parent post was someone literally hosting a crpyto conference, and this one was someone who runs a crypto company. A sibling story describes the father of a 'cryptocurrency influencer.' Is there any evidence of real crime happening which was targeted at Coinbase leak data, or is this just vibes
- suzzer99 1y agoWell you start with the low-hanging fruit. Also I imagine these things take a while to plan.
- normie3000 1y ago
- ClumsyPilot 1y ago> will never be forced to reimburse all the damage they've done because the true cost would bankrupt the company This story keeps repeating. Maybe we should try it and see if it works as a deterrent.
- bobthepanda 1y agoIt's worked before; Arthur Andersen ceased to exist after the Enron accounting scandal.
- iambateman 1y agoSo you’re saying that one year of complementary credit monitoring by Experian isn’t enough??? /s
- cyanydeez 1y ago"decentralized currency"
- modeless 1y agoBitcoin is plenty decentralized. Coinbase deals with dollars, that's the non-decentralized part.
- cyanydeez 1y agoso, the part that makes bitcoin useful to 99% of the people is the non-decentralized part. Sounds like an appendix.
- theossuary 1y agoOnly because of US law. It didn't have to be this way; the US wanted to destroy Bitcoin as a currency because it threatened their surveillance state, and they effectively have.
- enaaem 1y agoNo entity is obligated to enforce contracts in BTC. The real reason what makes a currency valuable.
- twosid3dDice 1y agoBtc whales want to destroy the dollar because it benefits them. Neither the dollar or crypto are anything but social illusions, neither have an inherent right to exist. It’s just people manipulating people. Such an intellectually dishonest forum to sit here and discuss meaningless layers of obfuscation. The most important thing to any individual is enough other humans around their own life isn’t so hard. Specific humans, like those on this forum, are not essential. You all can bleat on as hard as you want about the existence of crypto but it’s not an evenly distributed belief. And your individual value is non existent to the majority on the planet. No reason to prop up your hallucinations
- aeternum 1y agoWhy do you see this as the fault of Coinbase? Do other companies somehow have employees that are immune to bribes and blackmail? This is due to US Government KYC laws that forced Coinbase to associate government identification with all accounts. No crypto company required ID until they were forced to.
- lavezzi 1y agoYou don't think Coinbase is responsible for restricting access to member data for support agents?
- panarky 1y agoThe US Government didn't provide high-volume, bulk access to this extremely sensitive information to contractors in foreign countries with no controls over their ability to mass-exfiltrate the data. Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system. Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk. Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed. The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.
- aeternum 1y agoFair enough, and it does sound like they had limits given that not all customer data was exfiltrated but those limits were probably far too high at tens of thousands affected.
- DennisP 1y agoOutsourcing also led to the Ledger leak of customer data. You'd think Coinbase would have learned a lesson from that.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- beaned 1y agoThey said less than 1% of users were affected.
- andy_ppp 1y agoCompanies should seriously consider implementing GDPR even in the US, it certainly made taking data dumps of customer data a lot harder and certainly private images like Government IDs were encrypted on disk. I’m surprised at the lack of security if I’m honest, at Yahoo! almost nobody had access to prod user data. Essentially you cannot trust Coinbase IMO, might move the few hundred dollars of BTC out of there :-)
- ethbr1 1y ago> I'm surprised at the lack of security if I’m honest This is the crypto industry, who make the discrepancy between Theranos' claims and practice look conservative.
- hulitu 1y ago> Companies should seriously consider implementing GDPR even in the US ... and save the data in US cloud where everybody can access it. It is really funny how FAANG can get away with data colkection in spite of GDPR.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYeah this is really frustrating, especially the way the EU commission keep coming up with workarounds that the court will almost certainly strike down.
- csomar 1y agoHow would GDPR help in this case where the employees were bribed?
- baobun 1y agoInternal segregation. If inplemented properly perhaps these specic employees wouldnt have access to all that data in the first place.
- Aloisius 1y ago> How does Coinbase protect data in transit and data at rest? > Coinbase employs a range of technical and organizational measures to defeat efforts to intercept, surveil, or otherwise access without authorization data in transit. For instance, Coinbase encrypts all confidential data transfers to prevent interception or tampering of that data by unauthorized third parties. Coinbase does business in the EU and thus, already has to comply with the GDPR. Moreover, the US also requires safeguards for sensitive customer information by financial services companies.
- gxs 1y agoAnd yet, Coinbase goes Scott free Someone, someone at that company should be going to prison for negligence
- hulitu 1y ago> Someone, someone at that company should be going to prison for negligence That's not how capitalism works. /s
- mlrtime 1y agoCan you point to a specific law that was broken where prosecutors have a chance at jail time, or is this a fantasy of yours?
- morcus 1y agoThe comment said "should be" which you glibly interpret as "should be going to jail based on the law" but could very easily be "the law should be such that this kind of negligence results in jail time".
- nkrisc 1y agoI assume they mean that someone from the company going to prison for this would be a just outcome, not that a path to such an outcome exists today (it likely does not).
- dachris 1y agoWhy is this such an issue with crypto? Wealth status is often very well known for public figures and entrepreneurs. People are driving around in $200k cars. Is it due to the liquidity of cryptocurrencies that $5 wrench attacks work better?
- sanswork 1y agoIt happens with cash sometimes but people are limited to the amount they can get out of an ATM where with crypto you can force someone to hand over all their wealth with a few keystrokes.
- rsynnott 1y agoIf you're kidnapping a generic very rich person, how are you expecting them to pay the ransom, a big burlap sack of cash? There's a lot that can go wrong there. A bank transfer or other conventional financial instrument? Few criminals would be comfortable with that approach. (John Grisham novels, and 'Archer's beloved bearer bonds, aside, it's virtually impossible to make this untraceable). Magic internet money is presumably far less messy. Also, a decent proportion of crypto-millionaires came by their riches in... not entirely above-board ways (in particular, securities fraud; all those pump and dump scamcoins are paying off for _someone_), and may be reluctant to involve the authorities. And the crypto industry as a whole is unusually comfortable with extortion; hacked crypto companies paying a kind of bounty to hackers to get the rest of the funds back is a common thing.
- csomar 1y agoThey can use their bank account to buy crypto and then pay the ransom. Kidnapping is a thing in latin america before crypto became cool.
- rsynnott 1y ago“Hey, cryptocurrency exchange, I, a random rich person, would like to, having never interacted with you before, buy a million dollars of bitcoin and transfer it out. Today, please.” That is simply not going to happen.
- Probiotic6081 1y ago[dead]
- _Algernon_ 1y agoHow can I check if I am affected by this?
- skybrian 1y agoIf you were affected, you should have gotten an email yesterday.
- ne0flex 1y agoI checked my email to see if I received anything and, interestingly, I received an email from Coinbase on April 14 that they're updating the User Agreement. The new terms only apply to disputes initiated by me or Coinbase after May 15, 2025. Timing seems suspect.