Urgent help needed - assets vanished from wallet

Please only post Brave Wallet inquiries in this category – visit the Brave Rewards category for all related rewards issues.

The Brave Team will never ask you for your recovery phrase or private key.


Description of the issue: I was on line with Brave support when my assets vanished

Is the issue occurring on a specific network? All SOL and ETH assets vanished

What operating system are you using? IOS18

Brave Version (check About Brave):

Additional Information: I had around USD 970 in my Brave Wallet just few minutes ago. Now I have US 0.393. Customer Support no longers answers me.

I’m sorry to hear about your situation. Brave doesn’t have live support, so if someone claimed to be Brave support, it’s likely they were a scammer.

There’s a pinned warning about this at NOTICE: Brave will NEVER ask for your private Wallet data/keys

I shared an image there that might be helpful:

It sounds like the scammer may have accessed your wallet. The warning in the template advises against sharing sensitive information:

Unfortunately, if someone obtained your seed phrases or private keys, there’s not much that can be done to recover the assets. This is why it’s crucial to never share your seed phrases or private keys with anyone. Once assets are gone, they’re generally gone forever, especially with self-custody wallets.

Hello - I posted on a different topic and someone replied with a link to live support - see attachment. Are you saying this is some kind of phishing site not belonging to you? Now since my private keys have been compromised , what are next steps? Can i close my wallet forever, or change seed phrases?


@marionsan if it was Brave, it would be through brave.com. Just like you see https://community.brave.com/, https://account.brave.com/, https://support.brave.com/, etc. But even in seeing that, it’s always important to also see what specific address they link to. For example, I could show you https://www.brave.com but if you look, it’s actually put in to be Google. So clicking that last one would take you to Google, even though it appears as if it’s set to take you to Brave.com.

And yeah, there are people who will quickly create accounts here and even clone Brave’s support site to try to appear as if they are from Brave. But it’s always incredibly important to pay attention to links and all. Not only in what is spelled out, but to see what they redirect to.

You can see that the website they sent you to was a so-called livesupportchats.app I’m not sure if that entire website is a scam thing or if it’s just something they used. I do know that as soon as the scammer posted, it was flagged and the account removed.

I know Support is constantly battling these scam accounts. They block IP addresses and accounts many times each week. There’s no way to completely stop it and can only fight by reacting as they see things. Beyond that just try to put in the warnings as have done.

And there are plenty of places where warnings are given. I linked one pinned thing earlier, but then there’s also pinned post like you see below:
image

Some of the things shared there:

@Mattches @steeven Hi Guys - I am sorry to report that it looks like my digital assets have been stolen from my wallet today. I had around USD 1000 worth of SOL and ETH in it. The timeline is like this:
Today - 24.Sep 2024 - I made transaction in my wallet to swap some Shiba Inu for ETH. The transaction did not seem to go through and so I posted on community.brave.com a post asking for advice. I received a reply with a link to live support. I chatted with the support who instructed me to click connect in the upper right corner of Brave support site. He then instructed me to follow the instructions. I have transcript of the chat which I emailed to myself. This was an expensive mistake on my end. I was completely blinded and should had spotted it, I accept it. I will use this experience to try fighting these scammers harder and share my experience with users and public so they do not fall prey to these criminals. Funny that I thought I could never fall victim to online fraud. Greetings from Gen X.

Thanks @Saoiray much appreciated. expensive way to learn from my end. what can I do next in terms of the wallet? I guess it is now compromised and cannot be used any longer, correct?

@marionsan you could always try to contact your local law enforcement as some have web crimes, but cryptocurrency fits in a bit of a gray area in most places. You could perhaps check places like solscan to see where things got sent to and share that information, such as if you see it going to Coinbase or some other exchange, but usually it gets split and laundered. Finding an end point is incredibly difficult. It’s one of the downfalls of things like crypto which isn’t as regulated.

And you’re correct in that your existing wallet is compromised and would need to be abandoned. So as Brave Wallet, you would reset it and just start a new one. Setting you would use to reset is at SettingsWeb3 and then like below:

image

@Saoiray yes, I certainly plan to contact law enforcement to report it. I also try contact some digital assets recovery experts to at least try get some insight into the theft. I will report here results here hopefully but strangely all transactions have been wiped out in my wallet too. I have no hope my assets will ever be recovered.

Many (if not most) of those are scams. Be very careful on that and what info you provide. Especially if they try to ask you to check your device remotely or something.

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You wouldn’t necessarily see it in Brave Wallet. But you would put your account info into a place like Solscan which then will show all activity in and out. For example, going to solscan.io and putting in zkA1E5jpMh52ggv1agK221vxoJYuXmFSR74u7MzQNGe would show like below:

Notice how checking on Transfers or Balance Changes it will show what address it was sent from, where it went to, the amount, etc? That’s what people would look at. On crypto, there’s always a trail. No way to erase it. But it’s just that it usually exits through stolen accounts or whatever and then gets thrown around a few places where it can be more difficult to find in the end.