Popular Musician Loses Life Savings Through Malicious Crypto Wallet in Apple's App Store

Musician G. Love lost his life savings after downloading a fake Ledger Live app from Apple’s Mac App Store, according to a post made to his X account. Noted blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the stolen 5.92 bitcoin, worth about $424,000, through nine transactions to deposit addresses at KuCoin, an exchange with a track record of compliance problems that he believes will offer little help in recovering the funds. The theft combined a counterfeit app with a critical mistake by the musician. While setting up his hardware wallet on a new computer, G. Love likely entered his seed phrase into the lookalike software. On its website, Ledger includes requests to input seed phrases as a warning sign that a user could be using fraudulent software. Hardware wallets exist precisely to avoid exposing that phrase, yet he did so under the assumption that Apple’s App Store had vetted the program. The funds vanished immediately after he confirmed the phrase, wiping out nearly a decade of retirement savings he had accumulated in bitcoin. “I been in the crypto circus since 2017,” said Love in a follow-up post. “Today they caught me off guard. It was my own damn fault for not being more diligent.