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The effort to reimburse victims of the recent Trust Wallet Browser Extension hack has hit a significant snag: a flood of fraudulent claims attempting to siphon off compensation funds.
In an update posted Monday morning, Trust Wallet CEO Eowyn Chen revealed that while the company has identified exactly 2,596 affected wallet addresses, their support team has received approximately 5,000 compensation claims.
The discrepancy indicates a “significant number of false or duplicate submissions attempting to access victims’ reimbursements.” This forced the company to implement stricter verification measures before releasing funds, the CEO stated.
The data shared by Chen highlights the scale of the challenge facing the support team.
- Confirmed Victims: The forensic investigation has pinned down 2,596 specific wallet addresses that were compromised by the malicious v2.68 update.
- Total Claims: The refund portal has been inundated with nearly 5,000 submissions.
Chen noted that this volume includes malicious actors trying to game the system.
Verification: ‘Accuracy Over Speed’
Due to the high volume of spam submissions, Trust Wallet is “prioritizing accuracy over speed” in processing the refunds.
Chen said the team is currently working to verify claims by “combining multiple data points to distinguish legitimate victims from malicious actors”. This means genuine victims may experience a waiting period as the team manually filters out the thousands of fraudulent requests.
“We recognize the impact this incident has had on our users… and we appreciate the patience shown as our team continues to execute the compensation process,” Chen stated.
Investigation Update
Alongside the refund process, the broader forensic investigation into how the malicious code was injected into the browser extension is ongoing.
Chen mentioned that while some data is still being finalized, the team already has “strong working hypotheses for a portion of the cases” regarding the breach mechanics.
The Trust Wallet Hack
The incident, which occurred over the holiday weekend, involved a compromised version (v2.68) of the Trust Wallet browser extension that silently harvested user seed phrases, resulting in an estimated loss of $7 million.
The company reiterated that resolving this incident remains its “top priority”.
This article is published on BitPinas: Trust Wallet CEO: Refund Process Slowed by Thousands of Fake Claims; 2,600 Wallets Confirmed Affected
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