My Story

I accessed my wallet on 19 Sept 2017 at c.17:40 BST and realised my cryptocurrency is missing. Yes, GONE! Just simply not in my wallet.

I wondered immediately have I logged into the wrong account (I have two). I logged out, logged into the other one, and realise yes, my account balance is truly not there. Being an accountant, turned auditor, turned risk and regulatory specialist, you naturally are conscious of the big-bad world of cyber risk and have controls (even in your personal life, sadly!) to ensure your assets and investments are safe, safeguarded and independently verifiable in the offline world. As we know in the world of crypto, there are no paper bank statements in the post, and so I referred to my records in case I made a late night trade and forgot about it. But yes, my expected crypto balance is not reflected in my wallet.

First thing that goes through your mind, HACKED! So I check my devices for any unusual activity, thinking back could there have been an instance somebody got a hold of my credentials, also running through every possibility I can think of in my head, phishing, etc. Nothing suspicious or adverse presents itself. My password is strong, 12 characters long made up of upper case and lower case, letters, numbers and symbols. The only other place I use the password is for my password manager. In case you wondering, no, I did not have 2FA setup, but then with a strong password it is irrelevant really. Besides up until that day GateHub sent me an email every time I logged in from any device, which strangely they stopped doing now!.

Next up, I log in to my GateHub wallet, and download a statement. I could clearly see there were two unknown transactions, both on 19 Sept 2017 (15:08 BST).

The first transaction sells/exchanges all my ether (9.25 ETH/Ethereum) I owned for XRP (Ripple).

The second and last transaction then transfers all the XRP (32,000) to an unknown address (rHdNRDdqB1hSEHmPvCdnJvLU7W7oQsBGVq) leaving me with a measly 46.32 XRP.

I did not recognise these transactions which immediately put me onto my next action, I contacted GateHub Support for answers and of course restitution.