Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, warned the community about a fake security alert in a post he made on social media.
According to Zhao, the Discord admin account of Ledger, a popular crypto hardware wallet maker, was compromised and scammers directed users to a fake website to share their custom recovery phrases.
Zhao used the following expressions in his message:
“Ledger's Discord admin account was hacked. The scammer urged users to enter their recovery phrases on a phishing site, claiming a fake security vulnerability.”
Zhao explained that there are two important lessons to be learned from the incident:
- Under no circumstances should private keys or recovery phrases be shared.
- Social media accounts of crypto companies are often the weakest links.
The scam message advertised a fake vulnerability using the name Ledger and asked users to connect their wallets by clicking on a fake link and entering a 24-word recovery phrase.
Ledger responded to Zhao's post, sharing details of the incident with the public. The company said the message in question was not written by Ledger and was part of a phishing attempt.
According to the company's statement, the incident occurred approximately 24 hours ago. The account of a Discord moderator employed by Ledger as an intermediary was briefly compromised, and during this period, the fraudulent link was shared in only one channel.
Ledger announced that the incident was brought under control in less than an hour, the fake site was reported, the compromised account was removed from the system and all permissions were restored to security.
The company also reported that they have increased security measures and that Discord servers are now fully functional. Users are reminded once again to only trust announcements from official sources.
*This is not investment advice.
