This week, a US victim lost $3.05 million (1.2 million XRP) in a theft from their Ellipal wallet, a video that went viral on YouTube. Here's how the stolen funds ultimately ended up and what lessons can be learned from similar thefts.

Update: It appears OpenVPP may have misrepresented another partnership with Commonwealth Edison (ComEd). When contacted, the company stated: "We are not working with them and have no interest in doing so."

This week, the @OpenVPP ($OVPP) project claimed to be working with the US government on energy tokenization. Twelve hours ago, Hester Pierce responded, stating that she does not work with or endorse private cryptocurrency projects. OpenVPP subsequently hid her response from the post. I reviewed the accounts promoting OpenVPP and found them to be common influencers. Update: The OpenVPP team issued a statement stating that the response was accidentally hidden by a full-time intern.

RT @zachxbt: @jrcryptex Imagine playing an LRP like a rich guy and prostituting yourself for $25k without even the bare minimum of disclosure https://t.co/RiUEFWs…

Latest leak: Over 200 cryptocurrency influencers recently contacted them to promote a project and publicly share their price list and wallet addresses. Of the over 160 accounts that accepted the offer, I saw fewer than five publicly displaying the promotional posts as advertisements.

On August 19, 2025, a victim lost 783 Bitcoin (US$91 million) after being scammed by social engineering scammers impersonating exchange and hardware wallet customer service. The stolen funds began to flow out, with the attackers depositing funds into the Wasabi platform. Coincidentally, this theft occurred on the one-year anniversary of the $243 million Genesis Creditor theft. Stolen transaction hash da598f2a941ee3c249a3c11e5e171e186a08900012f6aad26e6d11b8e8816457 Stolen address bc1qyxyk4qgyrkx4rjwsuevug04wahdk6uf95mqlej

1/ An unnamed source recently hacked into the devices of North Korean IT workers and learned how a small team of five ITW members used government IDs to operate more than 30 fake identities and purchased Upwork/LinkedIn accounts to obtain project development work.

11/ Key challenges businesses face in combating illegal North Korean workers (ITWs) include a lack of collaboration between the service sector and the private sector. Furthermore, the teams employing these workers are negligent and can become aggressive after receiving warnings. ITWs are not complex, but they are remarkably persistent due to the large number of illegal workers entering the job market worldwide. Payoneer is often used to convert fiat currency earned from development work into cryptocurrency. I've already discussed the indicators to watch for multiple times, so I won't repeat them here.

10/ Another common question is, "How do you know they're North Korean?" In addition to all the fraudulent documents detailed above, their search history shows they frequently use Google Translate and translate documents into Korean using Russian IP addresses.

Update: Crypto Beast just reactivated his account a few minutes ago and changed his username to @realcryptoelio