Topic: Upgrade Stole My Bitcoin (Read 660 times)

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Those 2 people bumped up this old thread. 

For the sake of on topic reply then heres a screenshot showing off some notification or alert on electrum wallet in pc
which you should always make some verification on electrum.org on whats the latest update so you wont
really get phished.

3.5 BTC ... It's really not nice. A bitter lesson for life. We always try to improve our security to the maximum, and in this endeavor of ours we often forget and fall into similar traps. When it comes to safety, it is worth working out certain paths that you will walk on from day to day without changing them. For example, downloading updates only from an official source whose link you will check every time you try to update, because the source itself can also be compromised. Sympathize with you.

My friend has also experienced the same thing, since there has been a link that has shared some discussions about fake download electrum, so you have to be more careful to act. I'm sorry for you, but this is not the end because we can get some bitcoin to cure it. More alert to all kinds of suspicious things. I personally consider this a very serious problem, because this is not an ordinary phishing action, I have already tried downloading it. It can't be helped, there is almost nothing suspicious, but we can know that it is fake when we want to download it, and also Electrum has several times reminded its users.

This has been the problem with upgrade pumping up from your computer system and just clicking on these pops could lead anyone to a dirty place like OP. Am very careful about my computer upgrad because many had lost their stash through this process. Advuse- always visit the original or official websites for the upgrade than to click phishing links.

you can simply upload the screenshot on Imgur and share the link of the image here in the thread you made. high ranking members can quote your post so the screen shot will be visible without clicking the link to the website.

This was way more complex than the average phishing attack, the hacker took advantage of a weakness on the electrum wallet to broadcast a message to anyone that connected themselves to a malicious server deployed by the hacker, if the victims downloaded the new wallet from the link the hacker gave and installed that wallet they will lose their coins, otherwise nothing will happen.

This is really sad for the OP but if anything we need to learn several lessons from this:

Only download sensitive software like wallets from the source.
Verify the download.
Only install a wallet on a safe computer.
If storing large quantities of money get a hardware wallet.
Keep your OS and your wallets up to date.

For anyone interested this is a link to the news.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/phishing-attack-on-electrum-wallet-nets-hacker-almost-1-million-in-hours-report

Unfortunately, It seems like you were a victim of a phishing attack by downloading fake and unofficial version of Electrum wallet. In order to securely I would recommend you to search the forum and and find the thread about how to securely verify .asc PGP key in blockchain verify the Electrum wallet before you even try to download it. Otherwise, this wallet maybe work perfectly for you and seems like official version. The only difference is the unofficial version will send your seed phrases and private keys to the hacker for the future abuse.

So sad that there are techie thief now. The thief now has become more knowledgeable and intelligent in stealing money. I had thought tha thief would only do it taking money by force like in the malls or in the streets aiming a gun in their victims.

The worst thing is that 3.5 BTC was stolen and in our place that money is already huge. It can even buy a house and lot or a nice good car. Anyway hope that you can get a help and trace the theif since it could do because bitcoin has blockchain. But, there is a little bit problem with it because theif could convert btc to other blockchain platform like the altcoins.

There are definitely transaction details of the loss and the balance is now zero. The history also shows the negative transaction. I took a screenshot to show you, but I can't see a way of posting it here without a link to a website (which I don't have).

Actually, I'm retired and my wife has severe dementia and aphasia, and I'm sitting in front of my computer with noise reducing headphones trying to concentrate past her extremely loud happy noises, so please forgive me for not being up with all the tricks of how to do things here. I do banking and the like when she goes outside, but those moments are brief and I don't get time to keep up with everything. (I couldn't even figure out how to quote a specific paragraph from a previous post.)

Cheers,
Rex717

Upgrade should have gone on a massive advertising spree to alert their users to this.

I can't believe years later it's still happening, and I'm sure it will for years to come.

Fucking hell.

Yeah, if it is really stolen from your wallet there should be some transaction made to get your funds out and be sent to another wallet, this should be in a transaction history, if not then, it is not really stolen.
I does not mean to recover your loss but it might help us to know what really happened and give you more accurate things to do. If you don't mind sharing it with us, can you?

Ahh 3.5BTC i won't feel any better until recovering that amount, that was huge actually, around $33,000 I could get a small refurbished house with that. Anyways, you need nothing but time to move on.

Electrum wallet are very vulnerable and a lot of bitcoin wallet has been lost and reported even here on bitcointalk. It is very important that when you want to use the wallet, always download from official website and do not try to use any link from other source. You didn't provide details about where you download the original electrum wallet from, that could be where the problem come from. I will suggest you drop full details of your wallet address and transaction to further analysis

Actually posting the transaction details is not help you recover your bitcoin, they just want to check if your loss is real or it is your fantasy story.
Anyway, I think now you feel better , let's believe that nothing is lost forever, it will come back to you in another form .

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all your replies and kind words. Yes, it was a huge loss, and I haven't felt like coming back here (or much else) since then.

For all those comments about learning lessons. Yep, hindsight is a great teacher and I take responsibility for my own mistakes. It's certainly becoming more and more necessary to keep our eye on the ball without even blinking. Goodness, I'm getting sore eyes already! LOL

The reason that I had the BTC is that I had an investment a couple of years ago that only paid dividends in BTC, so I had to get a wallet to receive them, and Electrum seemed like the best option at the time. The value of the coins was low at the time, so I just let them sit in the hopes they would increase.

Now that I had a need, I planned to withdraw them (to help build small businesses in poor communities in India and Africa).

I started to do a test withdrawal of a small amount when I got the popup message within Electrum that a mandatory security upgrade was required before proceeding with the transfer. This didn't surprise me, because I hadn't used it for a couple of years and still had 3.2.3.

It didn't have a link, but a masked url to copy. As soon as I downloaded and installed the "upgrade", it did the transfer of everything in my wallet..... and there was frustratingly no STOP button to press while it was in process.

I must admit, the unrecoverable nature of crypto has not made the thought of trying it again very palatable, but praise God, I'm sure it will work out in the end.

BTW, there were some who made comments about posting the transaction details. Is there really a possible outcome with that?

Thanks again everyone.
Rex717

OMG, damn! 3.5 bitcoins? That’s a really big amount that you lost there. I don’t have that much, and if I do and I end up losing it, I will cry meehn. I hope you find a means in future to make more than that. I usually recommend that newbies make use of wallets that they can easily understand.

All these decentralized wallets like Ethereum, Exodus, and the rest of them are quite complicated with their process and that’s why I wouldn’t recommend it to a newbie who knows nothing. If you’re using a simple wallet like Coinbase on your mobile phone you wouldn’t have had this problem, since every upgrade will be on app store. Sorry for your loss man.

Sorry for your loss. This is why I always verify signatures whenever I upgrade to a new wallet version.

Truly this is a very sad thing. But lost bitcoin can never be recovered So you have to know and learn well first. Try learning by observing the best sites for bitcoin control They are as safe as keeping physically precious metals. Just like keeping a bag of gold coins a person who is careful can have their personal cash safe by being stolen by hackers The wallet is very reliable in Electram but 2fa code is much less likely to be hacked.

Could you please tell us where this message was sent and where it came from?

Sometimes it is not the downloading of the app which is problematic itself. One may download the legit app but still fails to protect his/her BTC due to messages such as the one you received giving fake instructions on the updates.


25% is too low in my opinion. I guess more than 70% of BTC owners have made a misstep or two along the way that could have totally wiped out everything they own. It so happened that scammers are eyeing the significant amounts.

When I finally got into Bitcoin myself several years ago, I was quite enamored by the revolutionary philosophy behind it and I was too excited to own a little amount just to share with the feeling of being part of the entire saga. But that was before I got educated by the technical aspects of its security. I think this is also happening to many other newcomers probably including the OP.

The thought of losing just a few satoshi from this scammers and unimaginable, what more for 3.5 BTC. I hate to say this, but to really learn our lessons here, most of time we need to be a victim before we realised what we really need to do on how to protect our assets. This scammers are not going to stop here, they will continue until they victimised again. Electrum is one of the best wallet out there, if you really know how to used them.