Bitget CEO Gracy Chen reveals $80K loss from fake interview scam tied to Lazarus Group

Even the CEO of a major crypto exchange isn’t immune to getting scammed. Bitget’s Gracy Chen disclosed that she personally lost approximately $80,000 after falling victim to a social engineering attack disguised as a journalist interview, with the scheme bearing the hallmarks of North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group. The attack worked by exploiting trust in a familiar channel. Hackers compromised the X (Twitter) account of a well-known crypto media outlet and used it to impersonate journalists, reaching out to Chen under the guise of conducting an interview. A personal loss alongside a much larger breach Chen’s $80K personal wallet drain is a painful but comparatively modest figure next to the other number dominating Bitget’s security headlines. The exchange itself suffered a breach resulting in roughly $387.5 million stolen from its cold and warm wallets, an amount initially estimated at $351.6 million before being revised upward. The exchange-level attack didn’t rely on compromised private keys. Instead, attackers used spoofed transaction data to redirect funds. Bitget has pointed to its User Protection Fund, valued at over $464 million, as the backstop designed to absorb losses ...