Fraud scam: Letter mail to rip off the Ledger wallet
A letter with an official look is intended to entice victims to enter their ledger recovery seed on a fraudulent site.
Potential victims are supposed to enter their ledger recovery seed on the fake website.
(Image: heise online / dmk)
Anyone who deals with cryptocurrencies and assets has certainly at least toyed with hardware wallets such as Ledger. A reader has now received an insufficiently stamped letter. Criminals are trying to take over the Ledger crypto wallet and empty it.
The letter bears the official Ledger logo and also looks professional in other respects. A QR code is emblazoned on the one-page letter. Recipients should scan it and revalidate their Ledger wallet on the target website. The URL is renewledger[.]com, and the associated website is currently still active.
Fake ledger website: Indications of fraud
When visiting the website, potential victims must first solve a CAPTCHA and prove that they are human. An input mask for the 24 words of the ledger recovery seed then appears. The page looks very similar to the original Ledger website, but lacks details such as language switching and support for dark mode, and various current products do not appear in the footer of the page. However, all links on the website point to the real ledger.com domain. While the correct ledger domain is now around 30 years old, the fake site has been registered with a web discounter for around 14 days.
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However, if potential victims actually enter and send their 24 words of the recovery seed, the crypto assets are gone. The fraudsters gain access to the backup copy and can empty the wallet at lightning speed.
In July 2020, Ledger had extensive customer data stolen. Criminals were able to obtain the first and last names, postal addresses and telephone numbers of around 272,000 customers. This information ended up on the dark net. In addition, around one million email addresses ended up in the wrong hands. This data is apparently still being used by criminals as a starting point for their illegal activities.
Ledger was not yet able to respond directly to our inquiry. However, it is important that Ledger owners never disclose their recovery seeds at the request of third parties.
In mid-2023, Ledger came under fire from users because the company wanted to introduce a backup service for the secret recovery phrase called “Ledger Recover”. The fee-based service is intended to make it possible to store the seed phrase with cloud providers.
(dmk)
