Hackers Steal $42 Million Worth of Crypto Assets from Fenbushi Capital Founder Bo Shen – This is What Happened

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 1 min read
Source: Pixabay

Hackers have stolen as much as $42m worth of crypto from a wallet controlled by the prominent blockchain venture capitalist Bo Shen, founder of Fenbushi Capital.

The news of the theft was shared by Bo Shen himself on Twitter on Wednesday, with Shen saying the theft happened from his personal crypto wallet on November 10. He stressed that the theft did not involve any company assets.

“A total of 42M worth of crypto assets, including 38M in USDC were stolen from my personal wallet,” Shen wrote. He added that the incident had already been reported to local police, and said the FBI had also been involved.

Mnemonic words compromised

Examining the incident, the blockchain security firm SlowMist shared further details about the theft on Twitter, and pointed out that the reason for the theft was that the mnemonic words had been compromised.

The security firm said in the Twitter thread that the wallet used was Trust Wallet, a popular mobile wallet that supports a large number of cryptoassets. Trust Wallet is now owned by Binance, after being acquired by the exchange in 2018.

In total, 38.2m USDC, 1,607 ETH, 719,760 USDT and 4.13 BTC have disappeared from the affected Bo Shen’s wallet, SlowMist’s tweet said.

“We are working with to follow up on this theft, and with the FBI and lawyers already involved, we are calling on the hackers to pay back the money ASAP,” the firm wrote, while also sharing a detailed overview of the transaction flow in the theft:

Trust Wallet token soars

Despite the reported theft, the price of Trust Wallet’s own TWT token has largely remained unchanged on both Wednesday and Thursday this week.

The slow action for the token came after a massive bull run two weeks ago, when TWT rose from $1.9 to a high of $2.7 in a matter of just three days, and posting a 92% gain in a week.

TWT is a top 50 cryptoasset on CoinMarketCap’s ranking, with a current market capitalization of $910m.

TWT price year-to-date. Source: CoinMarketCap