This week seemingly started off bad for Ian Balina, a fairly prominent cryptocurrency vlogger. Balina was in the middle of a live stream on his official YouTube channel with 116,000 subscribers on Sunday Night when he received a shocking question from one of his viewers, “Ian, did you know that someone transferred all your tokens from your account?”
With $2 million worth of token gone from his account, Balina claimed that hackers hacked his wallet. However, this strange event has raised questions among members of the community.
Balina was reviewing an ICO for his subscribers when someone posted the comment, and he probably didn’t notice or ignored it. About 20 minutes later, the live stream abruptly ended. A few hours later, Balina appeared online to complete his review, blaming a power failure for the interruption.
As he continued the stream, he announced that he had noticed some unusual activity on his Google Sheets account where he keeps records of his cryptocurrency assets.
After the review, Balina requested for help on his Telegram channel. “Hey Crypto Family, I need you now more than ever,” he posted. “I had to end today’s live stream abruptly because I am being hacked.” He further posted three different Ether wallet addresses claiming he was trying to track them.
While it is not unusual for investors and exchanges to lose their cryptocurrency to hackers, Balina’s response to the situation seemed odd. Per what he wrote on Telegram, “I’m not worried about the money at this point.” He also stated that his priority is catching the malicious actor responsible for his stolen assets.
Balina gave a theory on how his wallet was hacked (now deleted):
This is how I think I got hacked. My college email was listed as a recovery email to my Gmail. I remember getting an email about it being compromised, and tried to follow up with my college security to get it resolved, but wasn’t able to get it handled in a fast manner and gave up on it thinking it was just an old email.
I kept text versions of my private keys stored in my Evernote, as encrypted text files with passwords. I think they hacked my email using my college email, and then hacked my Evernote.
The community still doesn’t understand what he was trying to say when he said that the hack on his recovery email gave the hacker access to the encrypted files in his Evernote. Evernote’s system is one of the most secure systems around. It requires users to remember their passphrase, and it can’t be changed through a recovery email address. Well, except he is trying to say that the password he used for his old email address was the same as his Evernote Passphrase.
The entire situation is all very odd, and we are not sure what to think or say. But Balina’s calmness alone calls for questioning. He is too chill for someone who just lost two million in the middle of a public crypto review.