The attacker then used THORChain to exchange the money.
Popular on-chain researcher ZachXBT revealed on Friday that a victim lost more than $282 million worth of BTC and LTC due to a social engineering scam involving a hardware wallet.
The stolen funds were converted into Monero (XMR), which was one of the reasons behind the asset’s massive price increase that started last week. The on-chain sleuth added that a large portion of the stolen BTC was bridged to Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin via THORChain.
On January 10, 2026, around 11:00 PM UTC, a victim lost $282 million worth of LTC and BTC due to a social engineering scam involving a hardware wallet.
The attacker began converting the stolen LTC and BTC into Monero via multiple direct exchanges, causing the XMR price to surge.
BTC was also…
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 16, 2026
The crypto community quickly picked up on THORChain’s posts on X. Some members accused the platform’s social media team for bragging about enabling and even ‘celebrating’ crime.
Others outlined the dangers of social engineering fraud, which even puts money on hardware wallets at risk. Such scams are usually carried out through fake accounts that pretend to be an attractive woman who has suddenly fallen in love with the victim, even though they have never met.
At the time of the event and before swaps to XMR began, the privacy coin was trading for around $450. The price exploded to successive all-time highs in the following days, with the latest occurring on January 15 as it approached $800.
Since then, XMR has retreated heavily, perhaps because the attackers siphoned off some of the proceeds, and is now below $630.
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