$282 Million in Bitcoin and Litecoin Stolen in Trezor Impersonation Support Scam

Odaily News, January 10 - A Bitcoin and Litecoin holder provided a 12-word recovery phrase to attackers impersonating Trezor support personnel, resulting in the theft of approximately $282 million in assets, including about $139 million in Bitcoin and $153 million in Litecoin. Blockchain forensics firm ZeroShadow stated that the incident stemmed from a social engineering attack, not a compromise of wallet software or private key infrastructure. The stolen funds were split via the THORChain cross-chain bridge within minutes and converted into Monero through instant exchange services. ZeroShadow's monitoring team flagged and froze approximately $700,000 in funds within 20 minutes. Under the BIP39 standard, a 12-word recovery phrase contains approximately 128 bits of entropy, while a 24-word phrase contains 256 bits of entropy. Chainalysis estimates that up to 23% of all mined Bitcoin is permanently inaccessible due to lost keys, involving millions of BTC, with causes including forgotten recovery phrases, damaged backups, and a lack of inheritance planning.