Billionaire crypto backer Mark Cuban loses nearly $1 million due to common scam

A billionaire crypto backer has lost nearly $1 million due to a common scam, saying the wrong people ‘must have been watching’.

Mark Cuban is believed to have a net-worth of around $5.2 billion, having previously sold MicroSolutions off to CompuServe back in 1990 at a substantial profit.

These days, he’s best known for being one of investors on Shark Tank, as well as owning the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks, and regularly takes to TikTok to share bits of financial advice with his 984,000 followers in a bid to help them potentially become rich too.

However, he’s landed himself in some pretty rotten luck recently, having lost hundreds of thousands after falling victim to a hack last week.

According to crypto news site, DL News, he lost around $870,000 – ouch – which was only spotted after an anonymous blockchain watcher posted about it on social media.

Twitter

They’d noticed Cuban’s crypto wallet was being drained of its funds on Friday.

“Lmao, did Mark Cuban's wallet just get drained? Wallet inactive for 160 days and all assets just moved,” WazzCrypto said.

And sadly for Cuban, it wasn’t just online hearsay.

After being approached by DL News, he told the outlet: “Someone got me for 5 eth.

“I went on MetaMask for the first time in months. They must have been watching.”

The news site added that Cuban’s losses ‘extended beyond 5 Ether, worth about $9,000 at current prices’, saying that altogether he was set back by around $870,000 across 10 cryptocurrencies.

Assets affected by the hack included a range of stablecoins, tokens like Lido staked Ether, SuperRare, and Ethereum Name Service.

Cuban went on to say: “I’m pretty sure I downloaded a version of MetaMask with some shit in it.”

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

He explained that he had searched for Circle on Google, not MetaMask, and that his happened when he went to his account to clean it up on his phone.

“MetaMask crashed a couple times,” he said.

“I just stopped. Then you emailed me. So I locked my NFTs on OpenSea. Transferred all my Polygon in the account."

DL News explained how scammers often create fake MetaMask extensions or apps to trick users into providing private information, doing so to drain crypto wallets with ease.

“Since I was only working with the account that got hacked, none of my others gave up anything,” Cuban added, saying he managed to transfer remaining assets to Coinbase using ‘the dongle that Coinbases uses [for] authentication’.