His Wallet Was the Safe Kind. One Phone Call Cost Him $282M #cryptosafety #cryptoscam

In January 2026, a single crypto holder lost more than $282 million in Bitcoin and Litecoin — the largest individual crypto theft of the year — in what blockchain investigator ZachXBT identified as a hardware wallet social engineering scam. The victim wasn’t careless: they used a hardware wallet, widely considered the safest way to store crypto. But the attackers didn’t need to break the device. They manipulated the victim directly — the same playbook behind a $243 million social engineering theft in 2024, where scammers posed as Google and support representatives and talked the victim into resetting their own security. Once the funds were taken, the thieves rapidly converted them into privacy coins and bridged them across multiple blockchains to obscure the trail. The one rule that