He revealed that scammers hacked his iCloud account and he lost a whopping $6,50,000 (Rs 4.97 crore). All it took was only two seconds.
Domenic Lacovone disclosed the scam on Twitter. The whole thing began with a phone call he thought was from Apple.
It may have been fraud, so Lacovone ignored it. He decided to call it back because it was an Apple number.
“This is how it happened, Got a phone call from apple, literally from apple (on my caller Id). Called it back because I suspected fraud and it was an apple number. So I believed them,” Lacovone said in a tweet.
“They asked for a code that was sent to my phone and 2 seconds later my entire MetaMask was wiped,” he added.
He had a lot of valuable cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) stored in the digital wallet app MetaMask.
MetaMask stores a 12-digit “seed phrase’ file on iCloud automatically from his iPhone, which he had no idea about. When the scammers gained access to Lacovone’s iCloud, they emptied his account.
A seed phrase is needed to access a crypto wallet and should not be shared with anyone.
The still-shocked Lacovone has appealed to the online community and anyone who may be able to bring his money back.
If the money is recovered, he offers a reward of $1,000,000. He also offers the person gifts and valuables in exchange for the money.
“Don’t tell us to never store our seed phrase digitally and then do it behind our backs. If 90 percent of the people knew this I would bet none of them would have the app or iCloud on,” he was quoted as saying by the New York Post.
In addition, he has asked users to “expose” MetaMask.
As of yet, MetaMask hasn’t commented on the incident, but it has tweeted advice to users. According to the tweet, iCloud backups will include users’ password-encrypted MetaMask vaults and ask it can be disabled by disabling iCloud backups.