Another day, another cryptocurrency wallet hacked – This time; it is Blockchain Wallet CoinPouch.
CoinPunch, a Plano, Texas-based company providing multi-currency crypto wallets announced on Twitter that it suffered a breach in which one of its nodes that stored Verge currency got affected and resulted in the loss of user’s funds.
We discovered a hack of a @vergecurrency node that is connected to Coinpouch which resulted in the loss of user's funds. We are preparing a statement of the hack and the actions we are taking regarding the hack.
— CoinPouch (@coinpouchapp) November 22, 2017
The official Twitter account of Verge Currency has also acknowledged the hack and hopes that something will be done to bring the stolen funds back, since that the “Thanksgiving” related holidays in the United States might slow down the investigation.
The company did share alleged wallet address (DM5Esw71BnTdJzX1FWpNLvdnrLuCS91v4N) where stolen funds are being currently held. A look at the address shows there are 126 million Verge coins (XVG 126,138,145) in the wallet which is around $668,532.
our condolences to all users that had their funds stored on coinpouch. hopefully we can find out what happened. seems the coins have ended up at this address: DM5Esw71BnTdJzX1FWpNLvdnrLuCS91v4N https://t.co/JIeS2LARiN
— vergecurrency (@vergecurrency) November 22, 2017
On Reddit, however, a user shared another wallet address (D97fyoejXSLfcGwxC4UQt7AXKSnJwDiBxC) and stated that someone stole their Verge coin and sent it to the address which at the time of sending contained XVG 377,000,000 coins that are roughly $1,998,100. But at the time of publishing this article, there were XVG 17000000 in the wallet.
Screenshots from both wallet addresses
It might be possible that Verge tweeted the wrong wallet address. Therefore, it is unclear which wallet address is correct. Verge has also blamed CoinPunch for not securing their platform meanwhile in their official statement, CoinPunch said that on the 9th November 2017, a CoinPouch wallet users reported missing Verge coins, but upon investigating, it turned out to be a network related issue. After few days, more users had reported similar problem forcing the company to dig further, and found that one of the Verge nodes was compromised.
“At this moment neither Coinpouch nor Justin, the founder and lead developer of Verge,” said the statement.
This is second cryptocurrency related security breach in November. On 21st of this month, hackers stole $30 million worth of cryptocurrency after hacking Tether, a start-up firm known for offering dollar-backed digital currency.
At the time of publishing this article, the current status of the investigation is unknown since both companies tweeted about the issue one day ago.
