A developer transferred $24 million worth of cryptocurrency to scammers

According to Amsel's tweet, he was beaten, threatened with a gun, and threatened with rape. The developer appealed to anyone monitoring suspicious transactions to track down the stolen funds as quickly as possible and offered a reward of 10% of the stolen amount for their return.

PeckShieldAlert, a blockchain security company, suggested that the developer's actual loss of crypto assets may have been due to "poisoned addresses," whereby a victim sends crypto assets to someone else's wallet that matches the initial or final characters of the desired address. Fraudsters send tiny amounts of crypto assets to random users so that their address will be saved in the potential victim's transaction history, which could result in the victim copying the incorrect address without careful verification the next time they send funds. Amsel said PeckShieldAlert's assumption is incorrect, as he was physically injured.

"I can't reveal more information than I posted on X, but it has nothing to do with the address poisoning. I'm not anonymous, so I'm easy to track in real life. Like many other people, a similar situation could happen to them if we don't take action and show that thieves can't just walk away with their money," the developer stated.

Analysts at Arkham Intelligence reported that the majority of Amsel's funds transferred by unknown individuals remain in two Ethereum addresses, worth $20 million in DAI stablecoins. The unknown individuals transferred $2.5 million in crypto assets to the Hyperliquid blockchain platform via Arbitrum for withdrawal in Monero (XMR). Another $1 million was transferred in Bitcoin via the LiFi protocol.

According to CertiK analysts, the total losses from hacker attacks in February were the lowest since March 2025—approximately $37.7 million. This is 60% less than in January, CertiK calculated.