Popular on-chain investigator ZachXBT revealed on Friday that a victim lost over $282 million worth of BTC and LTC due to a hardware wallet social engineering scam.
The stolen funds were converted to Monero (XMR), which was among the reasons behind the asset’s massive price increase that began last week. The on-chain sleuth added that a big portion of the swiped BTC was bridged to Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin via THORChain.
On January 10, 2026 at around 11 pm UTC a victim lost $282M+ worth of LTC & BTC due to a hardware wallet social engineering scam.
The attacker began converting the stolen LTC & BTC to Monero via multiple instant exchanges causing the XMR price to sharply increase.
BTC was also…
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 16, 2026
The crypto community was quick to pick up THORChain’s posts on X. Some members blamed the platform’s social media team for bragging about enabling and even “celebrating” crime.
Others outlined the dangers of social engineering scams, which put even funds on hardware wallets at risk. Such scams are typically carried out via fake accounts impersonating an attractive woman who has suddenly fallen for the victim, even though they’ve never met.
At the time of the event and before the swaps to XMR began, the privacy coin traded at around $450. It exploded to consecutive all-time highs in the following days, with the latest occurring on January 15 when it neared $800.
Since then, XMR has retraced heavily, perhaps as the attackers offloaded some of the proceeds, and now sits below $630.
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