Photo Credit: RCXYZ NFT Gallery (The fake app in this story mimicked the official app for the Ledger crypto wallet, pictured right)
Musician G. Love says he lost his retirement nest egg, a smattering of Bitcoin, due to a scam app on the App Store.
“I had a really tough day today I lost my retirement fund to a hack/scam when I switched my ledger [hardware wallet] over to a new computer and by accident downloaded a malicious ledger app from the Apple store, All my BTC [Bitcoin] gone in an instant,” the musician tweeted out. He also shared his BTC address, hoping the community could help trace where the bitcoin ended up after thieves raided his wallet.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT later traced the stolen 5.9 BTC to see how the hackers covered their tracks. The funds were funneled through a series of transactions into the KuCoin exchange and from there, were sent to a crypto mixer to obfuscate where the funds came from.
KuCoin is facing regulatory troubles across the globe for precisely this reason—lack of KYC. KuCoin paid over $300 million to U.S. authorities to settle anti-money laundering violations in 2025. Now an order on April 8 enjoins the exchange from onboarding new US clients without CTFC registration, with an additional $500K fine levied by the CFTC.
So How Did It Happen?
If you’re unfamiliar with cryptocurrency in general, there are two ways to manage the digital money. You can purchase it from an exchange and use the exchanges’ wallet to hold the funds similar to a bank, or you buy a piece of hardware like a Ledger or Trezor (pictured above) to hold the money physically yourself. This is the digital equivalent of using a bank strong box vs. stuffing money under your mattress.
Hardcore crypto enthusiasts live by the mantra ‘not your keys, not your coins’ so they often store their cryptocurrency on hardware wallets. These hardware wallets have a 24-word seed phrase attached to them that functions like a master key—if you know this phrase you have acquired admin privileges on the wallet.
Instead of downloading the official Ledger app from the company who makes the hardware, G Love fell for a scam app. He entered his 24-word seed phrase into this fake wallet, exposing the phrase to scammers who could then move the money as if they were G Love, since they had his admin password.
Apple has since removed the fake Ledger Live app from the App Store, but lots of questions remain about how the app snuck onto the store in the first place. G Love wasn’t the only victim it seems; from April 7 to April 13, the fake phishing campaign impacted around 50 suspected victims across several cryptocurrency networks including Bitcoin, ethereum, Tron, Solana, and Ripple.
