Scott Purcell, founder and CEO of Fortress Trust, a custodian that protects customers’ cryptocurrencies wealth His company lost between $12 million and $15 million in cryptocurrency in a recent hack. Most of it was Bitcoin, but a small amount was also stolen from USDC and USDT, the two largest stablecoins by market capitalization.
“That’s $12 to $15 million of a billion dollars, and we paid it immediately,” he told wealth, refers to the total amount of stolen cryptocurrency compared to the total amount of cryptocurrency held by Fortress Trust for its clients. “There were actually only four customers out of 225,000.”
Purcell’s previously unreported admission comes after reports neighborhood Cryptocurrency giant Ripple has offered compensation to customers affected by the hack as part of its recently announced acquisition of Fortress Trust. The cryptocurrency custodian has previously said that the security breach did not result in a “loss of funds.”
A spokesperson for Ripple declined to comment on the extent of the security breach, but said “the amount used to disburse customer funds was included in the transaction.”
September 7, Fortress disclosed Four “Fortress customers were affected by a breach of a third-party vendor’s cloud tools,” writing that “the affected accounts have been fully restored.”
The next day, Ripple announced its acquisition of Fortress, with CEO Brad Garlinghouse saying in a statement that the company “has built an impressive business with recurring revenue and strong of crypto-native and crypto-new customers.”
As of the time of the announcement, neither Ripple nor Fortress Trust disclosed that Ripple had agreed to include customers as part of the deal.exist neighborhoodAmid reports of a further deterioration in the partnership, a Ripple spokesperson said, “Conversations accelerated last week following a security incident at a third-party analytics provider, but the opportunity is long-term for Ripple. meaningful.”
Purcell is the former CEO of Prime Trust, another cryptocurrency custody company that went bankrupt after being accused of misusing customer funds in a security breach. He declined to identify the four customers affected by the hack or “the third-party vendors of its cloud tools.” damaged. “
“As you can imagine, the first few days were complicated, involving (and continuing to involve) the FBI, Secret Service, regulatory agencies and other agencies,” Purcell told wealth in an email. “We hired a cybersecurity team that is very experienced in these areas to clean up the system and make sure nothing else was affected.”
Purcell has repeatedly stressed that the fault for the security breach lies with the third-party vendor, not Fortress Trust or the company’s hosting partners Fireblocks or BitGo.
A Fireblocks spokesperson did not confirm the severity of the security breach. wealth. “We can confirm that the breach occurred on a third-party service with pre-configured automatic authorization and that the Fireblocks platform behaved as configured,” she said in a statement.
BitGo CEO Mike Belshe previously release X (formerly Twitter) stated that the incident had “nothing to do with BitGo.” He added: “The real victims here are Fortress’ clients, and they deserve enough respect to know the full truth. They should not be blamed.”
Purcell, CEO of Fortress Trust said: wealth “
