A man’s life savings disappeared from a Ledger brand Nano hardware wallet after Reddit user moodyrocket purchased the wallet second-hand on eBay. The stolen coins amount to over $34,000.

According to posts on Reddit, the seller of the wallet utilized a ‘man in the middle’ attack, inserting his own recovery seed rather than the random seed assigned by the manufacturer. According to the post:

“I have not used my Ledger in a week, today I decide to check the value of my XRP, Litecoin and Dash only to discover that all of them showed up as zero and had been transferred somewhere else yesterday all around the same time at 7:30pm. I am not sure how this is possible as I have not access my Ledger in a week. I do not know what do to as the total value is over £25000, has by currency been stolen or is it something else? I am at a lost here and right now feel so physical sick. Some please help.”

The post shows the extent to which thieves will go to access coin wallets. Ledger’s CEO (user murzika) has offered to help ‘bring the seller to justice’ through legal means.

Need for security

As values of cryptocurrencies continue to increase, the reality of security needs continues to increase. Stories of theft and hacking continue to proliferate. For individual users some additional technology may eventually be required. Vadim Onishchenko, CEO of Blockchain photo sharing system Selfllery told Cointelegraph: