Apparently CryptoCore has raked in about $200 million USD from practicing low tech techniques like Spear Phishing and Whaling. The executives running the cryptocurrency exchanges were targeted in order to steal the wallet credentials. Worse yet, is that they have been very effective in covering their trail. Its likely to be based in eastern Europe, but that covers a lot of ground.

I have not been a proponent of cryptocurrency for a variety of reasons. Converting your pay check into 1s and 0s is risky enough with a conventional bank where there are regulatory safeguards to protect you. If your account at a normal bank (e.g. the 50 to 70% of vulnerable phone banking apps) gets looted, you have some recourse to get money to pay rent, buy food, and cover necessities until your bank resolves the issue. You are not simply out the money with no recourse. Laws have not yet caught up to cryptocurrency and if you load your pay check into one of them, I think its a bit crazy as things stand now.

People are quite concerned now about all of the facial recognition and the repurposed COVID contact tracing software. What they aren’t seeing is that cryptocurrency is the ultimate in financial tracing. At least if you take money out of an ATM, it becomes harder to trace. Buy a soda, get some change and you now have some relatively untraceable cash.