An investor who paid more than $ 3 million in transfer fees lost his bitcoins

A user who paid a staggering 83.65 BTC ($ 3.1 million) fee for a digital asset transaction last week has lost his funds. According to The Block, the investor’s wallet was hacked by hackers.

«I created a new cold wallet, transferred 139 BTC to it, and they instantly went to another address. Ican only assume that someone used a script that calculated the commission strangely,» the investor said. In addition, a transaction was sent from the same address with a text comment stating that the social media account was indeed the owner of the stolen funds.

According to the experts interviewed by The Block, the most likely reason for the hack is that the wallet’s private key was generated with insufficient randomness. This allows fraudsters to pick up the private key and gain access to digital assets. If this is true, experts say, then several criminals could have been competing for the theft of funds, which led to a very high commission.

According to the Bitinfocharts service, the average commission in the bitcoin network is currently $ 10.51. According to journalist Colin Wu, the block with a transaction volume of 139.42 BTC ($ 5.2 million) was validated by the AntPool mining pool.

In September, a similar story happened to another user who paid a fee of 20 BTC ($ 520,000 as of September 10) for just one transaction. Then it turned out that the transaction was made by Paxos. The firm accidentally overpaid this fee for a transfer of 0.074 BTC, equivalent to $ 200.