Crypto-related hacks, exploits, and scams caused a cumulative loss of $364 million in April, per a report released last week by CertiK. This amounts to an appalling 1,163% increase over the $28.8 million we lost in March. Though there were notable successful asset recoveries, the sum of those figures illustrates the ongoing, systemic vulnerabilities throughout the crypto ecosystem.
Much of April’s losses were due to a $1.46 billion exploit on the crypto exchange Bybit. Stablecoin issuer Infini took a significant hit as well, losing $49.5 million from a different exploit. Even taking the Bybit disaster out of the equation, April was still a month of huge losses. They’ve since hit a mind-blowing $34 million, a 21% jump since March.
One event led to a triple jump in losses. One older American was scammed out of 3,520 Bitcoin, worth about $330.7 million, all because he spoke with fraudsters impersonating federal agents. According to CertiK, this incident marks the fifth-largest crypto theft of all time. The attackers employed advanced social engineering techniques to take control of the victim’s wallet.
Though the losses have been steep, April witnessed some of the most successful recoveries. Loopscale was able to recover all the assets stolen when their vulnerabilities in their token pricing functions were exploited. The company was able to recover an impressive $5.8 million by negotiating directly with the attacker. After being offered a 10% whitehat bounty and promised immunity from legal action, the attacker returned the funds. In a related vein, ZKsync announced that the same attacker had agreed to return all of the funds in return for a 10% bounty. In an exceptional case, KiloEx was able to recover $7.5 million in stolen funds four days after an exploit occurred.
An estimated $18.2 million in stolen crypto funds were recuperated during the entire month of April.
According to CertiK’s data, February is still the most expensive month of this year, with a total of $1.53 billion lost. These losses were mainly fueled by just two large catastrophes.
