Upbit Hit by $3.4 Billion Fake Crypto Tokens Scam

Upbit, South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is currently grappling with a major security breach that has rattled the cryptocurrency community.

This breach came to light on Sunday when Upbit detected a fraudulent deposit where scammers successfully presented a counterfeit coin as the legitimate Aptos ($APT) token.

The breach was revealed when Upbit’s system mistakenly identified the counterfeit coin as $APT, enabling a bot to deposit a substantial amount of these fake tokens into numerous user accounts, affecting approximately 100,000 accounts with $APT deposits.

The total value of the counterfeit $APT tokens reached an astounding $3.4 billion, marking one of the largest cryptocurrency security breaches to date. There were also reports of Korean users receiving $APT tokens without initiating the transactions themselves.

In response, Upbit swiftly suspended $APT deposits and withdrawals for wallet system maintenance. The exchange assured users that services would resume once maintenance was complete.

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Further investigation by a South Korean crypto specialist, Mingmingbbs, revealed that the fake $APT tokens were not the native Aptos Network coin but a deceptive token called “ClaimAPTGift.”

The breach occurred because Upbit’s system failed to properly verify the type of coins being transferred, treating all coins as the same $APT token. Fortunately, the scammers’ token had a different decimal system (6) than the genuine one (8), preventing significant disruption.

Despite the incident, investors remained resilient, causing $APT’s value to rise by just over 5% in the past 24 hours, with the current price at $5.42.