Retired artist loses $2M in crypto to Coinbase impersonator
Retired artist Ed Suman lost over $2 million in cryptocurrency due to a scam involving a person impersonating a Coinbase support representative. Suman, 67, had invested in cryptocurrency after a career in art fabrication, accumulating 17.5 Bitcoin and 225 Ether, primarily stored in a Trezor Model One hardware wallet. In March, he received a text about unauthorized account access and was subsequently contacted by someone claiming to be from Coinbase. This individual convinced Suman to enter his seed phrase on a fraudulent website, leading to the loss of all his crypto holdings. The scam coincided with a data breach at Coinbase, where attackers bribed customer support staff in India to access sensitive user information, affecting about 1% of users. Coinbase plans to allocate $180 million to $400 million for remediation and reimbursement to impacted customers.
