The team behind Bitcoin Gold (BTG) have issued an official statement on the recent wallet scam that resulted in over $3.3 million in cryptocurrency being stolen reportedly.
Earlier this week, CoinDesk reported that the perpetrators, the operators of a website called “mybtgwallet.com,” took advantage of unsuspecting bitcoin users who were seeking to claim their share of Bitcoin Gold – a new cryptocurrency that resulted from the community-driven fork at block 491407 on the Bitcoin blockchain. According to the numbers reported by CoinDesk on November 22, at least $30,000 in ethereum, $72,000 in litecoin, $107,000 in bitcoin gold and more than $3 million in bitcoin were confiscated.
In its official statement, Bitcoin Gold team confirmed the wallet scam, but did not reveal the total amount stolen.
“Preliminary investigations indicated that at least some of the claims of theft by the mybtgwallet site are reliable. Like all third-party sites, that site was not in our control, but we immediately removed it from our pages,” it said. “It appears the mybtgwallet online wallet site was modified by unknown parties long after it was originally published.”
The team said that it is working with security experts to get to the root of the issue. It also outlined a few measures that can help cryptocurrency users safeguard their funds.
“It’s worth reminding everyone that it will never be truly safe to enter your private key or mnemonic phrase for a pre-existing wallet into any online website,” the statement reads. “When you want to sweep new coins from a pre-fork wallet address, best practice is the same as after other forks: send your old coins to a new wallet first, before you expose the private keys of the original wallet. Following this basic rule of private key management greatly reduces your risk of theft.”
