Vitalik Buterin fell victim to a cybersecurity attack on his social media account, resulting in huge losses for those who fell into this malicious trap.

On September 9, Dmitry Buterin, father of Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, announced on X (formerly Twitter) that his son’s account on the social network had been hacked.

X users lose $691,000 to phishing scam

Senior Buterin revealed the information while warning X users not to interact with a now-deleted message from his son’s account seemingly celebrating the coming of Proto-Danksharding to Ethereum.

The alleged hacker shared what turned out to be a malicious link to a non-existent souvenir NFT asking users to link their wallets, which were then drained of all funds.

Leading blockchain analyst ZachXBT reported that the incident resulted in collective losses for victims exceeding $691,000.

Among the victims was Ethereum developer Book Kho, also known as Booky Bubah. Khoo reported significant losses from his CryptoPunk NFT collection.

The hoax message has since been removed. However, by the time of publication, it was not clear whether Buterin had recovered his account.

This incident comes amid a growing wave of phishing scams on social media. Prominent figures in the cryptocurrency industry, including Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ), have expressed concerns about the rise of such attacks.

They warn that bad actors often use verified bots and strategically target influential Crypto In the past few months, hackers have targeted the social media accounts of media personality Peter Schiff, Uniswap founder Hayden Adams, Sandbox CEO Arthur Madrid, and popular NFT artist Peeple, among others.

XRP in the eye of fraud

Just as worryingly, the cryptocurrency community has been hit by a wave of online scams related to Ripple Labs’ XRP token. There have been a large number of posts offering large airdrops of XRP, leading to questions about the ability of platforms like X to limit spam and other malicious activity.

Despite recent assurances by X’s owner, Elon Musk, that the social network has eliminated most scams, cryptocurrency users had a different opinion.

Fraudulent activity, especially related to cryptocurrencies, has barely declined. Ripple and its XRP token are constantly being targeted, especially after increased media attention following the company’s partial win against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in July.