MALICIOUS BOT IN BINANCE PERFORMS MASSIVE SALE OF CRYPTOCURRENCIES WITHOUT CONSENT OF USERS
On the afternoon of this Tuesday, March 7, an error occurred in the Binance platform, an important cryptocurrency exchange house, which caused the massive sale of the altcoins of a group of users to later buy the Viacoin cryptomoneda without their consent.
With regard to this event, Binance's team issued an official statement stating that this platform had not been compromised, thus clearing the rumors of a hack into this exchange house. The Binance team also confirmed that the affected persons had registered their API private keys with platforms external to Binance, such as trading bots. The Binance team announced the suspension of all withdrawals of funds from their platform temporarily.
"We are investigating reports of some users who have problems with their funds. Our team is aware and investigates the problem as we speak. As of this moment, the only confirmed victims have registered API keys (to use with trading bots or others). There is no evidence that the Binance platform is compromised. Please be patient and we will provide you with an update as quickly as possible. Edited: Withdrawals are temporarily disabled at this time
Binance
It seems, according to the discussion between the community and Binance's statement in Redit, that what happened occurred because of an error in a trading bot, identified as altcoinbot.io, that some users had linked to their Binance accounts. So explains Ran Neuer, the founder of ONCHAIN capital.
In this way, it seems that what happened was a malicious Pump and Dump strategy that took the funds from the victims, turned them into Bitcoin, and then bought the Viacoin cryptocurrency to raise the price. At the time of the edition, Viacoin has risen 18.67% to $2.89, but thanks to this malicious strategy it managed to reach a maximum of $6.55 a few hours ago.
Viacoin reaches its highest price in weeks thanks to bot. Source: CoinMarketCap
A few hours after Binance's official communiqué, CEO Changpeng Zao declared that all irregular transfers had been identified and would be reversed, explaining that all funds are safe.
These events have had an impact on the cryptocurrency market, being part of the reason why, at the time of writing, 98 of the 100 cryptocurrencies with the largest market capitalization according to coinmarketcap suffer heavy losses. In addition to Binance's success, recent regulatory announcements by Japan and the United States have been added.
Pump and dump schemes, where the price of a cryptocurrency is so skyrocketing that it can be sold massively, bringing down its price, are unfortunately not new. Just a month ago, it was reported that the fraudulent E-Coin cryptocurrency scheme inflated its price by 4,000% in one day and then collapsed in a matter of hours.
Source: www.criptonoticias.com
I always recommend Ledger Nano S to save crypto.
It is not safe to leave in any exchange, even Binance.
I agree a cold storage is always the best way to store coins but in this case, the transactions were caused by a trading bot and you can't use cold storage with a trading bot.