CoinEx Confirms Millions Stolen in Crypto Heist

In a September 12 announcement, cryptocurrency exchange CoinEx confirmed that it had fallen victim to a crypto heist. resulting in an alleged theft of $53 million.

In a post on its website, the Hong Kong- headquartered company announced that its Risk Control System had ‘’detected anomalous withdrawals from several hot wallet addresses used for temporary storage of user assets on CoinEx exchange.”

After the initial investigation, the company disclosed that the theft was caused due to the leakage of a hot wallet private key. This resulted in unauthorized transactions involving Ethereum (ETH), Tron (TRON), and Polygon (MATIC) cryptocurrency.

Although the exact amount is yet to be disclosed by CoinEx, investigations by blockchain security firms PeckShield and CertiK Alert estimate the losses to be a total of $31 million and $53 million, respectively.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), PeckShield stated that following the theft CoinEx was drained of $19M in Ethereum (ETH), $11.5M in TRON, and $295k in Polygon (MATIC). The remaining $72 million have been transferred to the company-controlled cold wallet for safe keeping.

Furthermore, the exchange platform has taken other precautionary measures like, rebuilding and redeploying the wallet system, freezing malicious actors’ assets, suspending deposits and withdrawal services of all crypto assets, as well as an emergency closure of the hot wallet server.

These services are expected to resume once the company’s IT security teams ensure that all the incident-related risks are eliminated. It has also published a list of suspicious addresses involved in the incident and urged other exchange platforms and relevant project teams to freeze the fund movement across these published email addresses.

It also assured its customers that their assets were safe, ‘’CoinEx solemnly promises that users’ assets have NOT been, and will NOT be affected in this attack, and the CoinEx User Asset Security Foundation will bear the financial losses from this incident,’’ the post read. It has also advised its customers to avoid potential asset losses by not making any deposits to their old addresses, until CoinEx’s system recovery process is complete.