Go Phish: How This Bitcoin Investor Lost 17 BTC To An iPhone App

Bitcoin is once again making headlines everywhere, mostly for all the right reasons this time around. However, where there’s money to be made, there’s also scammers waiting in the shadows to steal funds whenever they can.

The latest situation involves a highly sophisticated replica of a popular Apple iPhone app, a malicious application from Apple’s App Store, and a now stolen 17 BTC.

Bitcoin Investor Has Half A Million Dollars Worth Of BTC Stolen

During the height of the 2017 bull market, one of the symbols that cryptocurrencies had “made it” was when Coinbase had been topping the Apple App Store for iOS devices for days on end. Investors were flocking to the platform in droves as Bitcoin FOMO took over.

These days, there’s much more variety out there, including more ways to buy or store cryptocurrencies beyond just Coinbase alone. The platform remains the most popular out there, set to go public within the next year or so.

Investors can also store their coins in third-party wallets, or use an app interface to interact with their hardware wallets, like Ledger or Trezor.

That’s exactly what Phillipe Christodoulou meant to do, but instead lost a staggering 17.1 BTC – worth over a half a million dollars – in a phishing scam.

bitcoin phishing 17 btc

The more expensive Bitcoin gets, the more scammers it attracts | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Beware Of Phishing Scams In Apple App Store, Social Media, And Elsewhere

Christodoulou downloaded a highly rated, five-star app from Apple’s App Store, the company’s flagship and regularly quality-controlled platform. Apple maintains certain standards, and works to prevent situations like this from happening.

But then why did it? Christodoulou is furious with the company and rightfully so. He is also demanding answers and justice.

“They betrayed the trust that I had in them,” he told The Washington Post. “Apple doesn’t deserve to get away with this.”

Scammers regularly pull this tactic with Apple’s App Store, and unfortunately, this application somehow snuck through. The app was posing as a Trezor app, bearing the company’s logo and all.

Related Reading | The Most Common Bitcoin Scams And How To Avoid Them

But after loading it with his life-savings, it wasn’t until later he had realized what had unfolded. The app was a phishing app, and now his 17.1 BTC are in the hands of a scammer.

Scams like this are unfortunately common wherever users aggregate and offer a back door to crypto assets. Even real, verified apps or in other situations, social media accounts, can still get hacked and result in a loss of coins.

It’s also important to always keep legitimate apps or wallets fully up to date, to avoid any loop holes or security vulnerabilities that have since been fixed, but must be installed through user intervention.

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