Member-only story
The $1000 Bitcoin Hack
How I nearly lost $1000 and possibly much more
I woke up one morning this week to find a notification on my phone that said my $1000 Bitcoin purchase was successful. The timestamp was approximately 3:40 AM. I thought maybe I had set up an automatic purchase or something. That didn’t make sense, though. I don’t have $1000 sitting around I can simply blow on a Bitcoin gamble. Something else must have happened.
I logged onto my Coinbase account. From what I was able to determine, someone got into my Coinbase account overnight, bought $1000 in Bitcoin, and then attempted to transfer the Bitcoin to someone else. Fortunately, Coinbase does not allow transfers out that quickly, so the transfer failed.
I managed to cancel the transfer request and lock my account, but the Bitcoin purchase was made, even though I had no money in the account.
As it happens, PayPal was set up as my funding source for Coinbase. So, the $1000 came from there. I don’t keep large sums of money in PayPal, so they turned to my PayPal backup source, which is my personal bank account. As of that morning, my bank had no record of the transfer, but PayPal said it was complete.
I immediately disputed the transfer with PayPal, but they closed the case within minutes.
“Based on our…
