Crypto venture capital firm Polychain Capital has confirmed that the X (formerly Twitter) account of its founder and CEO, Olaf Carlson-Wee, has been compromised. The hacker utilized the compromised account to post phishing links disguised as a website, claiming to offer an airdrop.
In a statement released on January 4, Polychain advised X users to refrain from interacting with Olaf Carlson-Wee’s account until further notice. The hacker, operating from Carlson-Wee’s account, initiated the promotion of a fake “$PCHAIN” token airdrop in a post at 8:20 pm UTC on January 4. The post encouraged followers to click a provided link to participate, stating, “Register below to participate,” alongside a URL that purported to be associated with Polychain.
Phishing scams often involve malicious links intended to deceive users into executing transactions that compromise their crypto wallets. The hacker continued to make additional posts, and at the time of writing, around 41,000 X users had seen the initial post.
In 2023, cryptocurrency phishing scams affected 324,000 victims, resulting in losses of nearly $300 million, as reported by security platform Scam Sniffer. Notably, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s X account was compromised in September, leading to the extraction of $691,000 from victims who clicked a malicious link falsely promoting a free nonfungible token.
Similar exploits were experienced by venture capital firm Blockchain Capital and decentralized finance protocol Compound Finance in August and December, respectively. Both incidents involved enticing users with promises of token claims.
Polychain Capital, headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2016, boasted $2.6 billion in assets under management as of July 2023. The firm specializes in managing actively managed portfolios of various blockchain assets.
Get $200 Free Bitcoins every hour! No Deposit No Credit Card required. Sign Up