Cryptocurrency exchange FTX has stated that it will give a one time $6 million in compensation to those who lost money as a result of a phishing scam on the accounts of some FTX users.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and CEO of FTX, stated in a Twitter thread on October 23 that although the exchange typically doesn’t reimburse users who have been “phished by phony versions of other companies in the market,” it will do so in this particular instance.
According to Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX would “not do this going forward” and that this was a “one-time incident.”
“THIS IS NOT A PRECEDENT,” he wrote, clarifying it was only the accounts of FTX users that would be reimbursed.
In a recent phishing attempt, hackers obtained user account application programming interface (API) keys, enabling them to utilize their cryptocurrency exchange accounts for unlawful trading.
The hack was discovered on October 21 when 3Commas claimed it received notification that some of its members were engaging in illicit trading activity.
In order to prevent further losses, FTX and 3Commas suspended the suspicious accounts after conducting an initial assessment. They also disabled the hacked API keys.
In a blog post he called the “5-5 standard” on October 19, Bankman-Fried suggested that hackers should be allowed to keep either $5 million or 5% of the money they have stolen, whichever is less.
In his most recent Twitter thread, he decided it was time to test out his freshly developed standard, pleading with the hacker to bring back 95% of the monies they had taken, or roughly $5.7 million, within 24 hours, promising that “we’ll absolve them.”
The month of October has been called “hacktober” by the cryptocurrency community when Chainalysis announced on October 13 that October 2022 has been the “largest month” ever for hacking activities, despite the report being released before the middle of the month.
Over 125 different occurrences, totaling about $3 billion, had occurred since the beginning of the month at the time of the report.