A crypto giant will soon take the plunge in the financial markets. Coinbase (code COIN), an American platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies ( Bitcoin , Ethereum, etc.) will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange on April 14, on the Nasdaq platform - a first for a virtual currency company . As expected, the group will use the direct listing method, and not a traditional IPO , and will therefore not recover any new money.
But the shareholders already present in its capital - the founders, employees and historical investors - will be able to sell their stakes on the market. This process has already been used by Spotify, Slack, Palantir or Roblox. A reference price will be provided the night before the operation. The platform was founded in 2012 in San Francisco and provides cryptocurrency buying, selling and portfolio management services. The group is growing: its turnover soared 136% in 2020 to reach $ 1.14 billion. And the platform made money last year: $ 322 million after losing $ 30 million in 2019.
By downloading an application, the holder entered his credentials and had all his bitcoins stolen.
He believed he had downloaded an app certified by Apple. And simply go to his Trezor wallet where $ 600,000 worth of bitcoins were stored. Except that as reported by the Washington Post , although the application is in the Apple App Store and is certified, rated in particular by five stars (out of five), it turned out that it was wrong. The application then used the information entered by the user to steal all his cryptocurrency. In total, the man saw more than $ 600,000 worth of bitcoins go up in smoke.
Angry because of this huge loss due to the third-party application, he is also angry with Apple since the company has, according to him, authorized the application to appear on its App Store. "They betrayed all the confidence I had in them. Apple does not deserve to get out of it like that", he testifies to our American colleagues. Because if Apple promises that the applications put forward on its space are "serious, verified, unique and secure", it would indeed be very easy for some to circumvent these security measures. And even when Apple finds out and the app is taken down, it's too late for the user who has lost everything.
Already more than two million dollars vanished?
In its defense, the Cupertino company highlights the fact that the application that presented itself to it has nothing to do with the one that stole all the user's bitcoins. Originally, the hackers pretended to be Trezor, and would have presented themselves as a simple system of encryption and storage of passwords. Apple even admits to having already withdrawn from the App Store more than 6,500 applications of this kind which did not respect the rules in force or were fraudulent. According to the British company Coinfirm, which specializes in cryptocurrency investigations, five people have already been duped by the fake Trezor app, with a total loss of more than $ 1.6 million. On the Android platform, three cases have also been identified for a theft of $ 600,000 this time.
So far, Apple has not wanted to give additional information about the developer of this application. Trezor has a website but no apps, and according to a spokesperson for the Czech Republic-based company, Apple and Google have been alerted "for years" to bogus apps on their platforms. They still seem to fall through the cracks.