Hackers have scammed $150,000 worth of Ethereum (ETH/USD) from the Experty ICO potential investors, by tricking ICO participants into sending tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Ethereum to the wrong wallet address, International Business Times reported.
The firm was looking to raise funds for the project in an upcoming ICO with sales handled by Bitcoin Suisse. However, hackers managed to exploit interest in the ICO scheduled for 31 January by sending phishing emails over the weekend that announced a phony pre-ICO sale to Experty users who signed up for notifications.
These phishing messages contained wallet addresses belonging to the hackers. Many investors, in the hope of receiving bonus tokens, fell for the scam – in the last few days, 74 transactions were registered to the addresses provided, the total value of all the transactions being $150,000.
In a post published in Medium, Experty wrote:
“We are greatly saddened by the recent email scam that has targeted our community due to the recent data breach.”
Experty has offered to give 100 EXY tokens to everyone who had their ETH address in their database "as a gesture of good will". It is currently reaching out to victims who fell for the scam before 28 January.
To stop scammers from taking advantage of the situation, the announcement added:
“Any ETH sent to the scammer after this announcement [January 28, 2018 at 21:30 UTC] will not be refunded in order to prevent people purposely sending money to the scam address to receive EXY tokens.”
The teams said the source of the hack had been eliminated and funds sent to Bitcoin Suisse were safe.