Hackers Drained $870,000O out of Mark Cuban’s Hot Wallet

Hackers drained a hot wallet belonging to billionaire Mark Cuban after he was apparently tricked into downloading a fake MetaMask app.

Hot wallets being drained in cyberattacks is a common occurrence. It usually happens when users fall prey to phishing attacks, but the occasional hack takes advantage of some vulnerability or exploit in the blockchain or in an application. What we don’t usually see is billionaires getting tricked.

Some unusual activity in Marc Cuban’s hot wallet caught the attention of blockchain watcher @WazzCrypto, who posted on social media that the billionaire’s funds might be getting drained.

Mark Cuban talked with DL News and explained that someone was likely waiting for him to return to the MetaMask app. “I went on MetaMask for the first time in months. They must have been watching,” said the billionaire.

While he said that he doesn’t know how the attacker stole the money, he intuits that he must have downloaded a fake version of MetaMask. He remembers doing a search on Google for the app and picking a link. There’s a good possibility that he actually downloaded a fake application. In fact, our own research shows that the Internet is rife with fake Android apps that pop up on the first Google result page.

“MetaMask crashed a couple times. I just stopped. Then you emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account,” Cuban told DL News.

Mark Cuban has been a crypto supporter for many years, and the latest incident just shows that no one is really safe. He lost $870,000 in this crypto hack,  and it’s not the first time he lost money this way. In 2021, Cuban was one of the victims when the Iron Financestable swap and lending ecosystem imploded, although it’s unclear how much money he lost on that occasion.