Summary
On a balmy evening in 2023 on the east coast of Spain, Olivier Acuña sat at his computer to transfer his life savings to another cryptocurrency wallet. As he hit send, $400,000 worth of crypto – all his money – was gone, pilfered by an anonymous phishing scammer.
The Loss
Acuña’s loss demonstrates that no one is immune to crypto hacks. He’s a seven-year crypto industry veteran, someone who grasps the need for wariness given the dangers that lurk around blockchains. Before that, he was a journalist for decades, where staying alert was a must as he faced violent drug cartels in Mexico and torture in prison.
Despite his experience, Acuña became one of the many victims of crypto scams. In 2023, U.S. officials received 69,000 reports of crypto theft totaling more than $5.6 billion. Getting that money back can be hard. If your normal bank account gets breached, insurance will almost certainly cover your losses. But there’s no highly regulated system like that in crypto, which is famously and quite intentionally decentralized.
The Hack
The hack itself was nothing special. Because Acuña couldn’t access his funds on a Ledger hardware device, he reached out to customer support via social media. An impersonator swooped in and, following 30 minutes of deception, Acuña was stuck in the scammer’s web.
Phishing scams remain incredibly prolific today. Phishing attempts are a growing concern in crypto, as criminals see it as an effective way to steal user funds at scale and apply social engineering for more sophisticated attacks on project infrastructure. Acuña was helpless again, this time at the mercy of a blockchain that was once his salvation following a horrendous ordeal of false imprisonment in Mexico.
Acuña’s Background
Working undercover as a journalist in the 1990s, Acuña confronted government censorship, false imprisonment and death threats. His work on organized crime, elections and corruption soon got him noticed by United Press International (UPI) and Reforma.
Based in Sinaloa, Mexico, Acuña’s coverage of the cartel eventually led to him working independently as a freelance journalist with his work being picked up by the likes of Associated Press and Reuters. This was when his career in Mexico reached a turbulent crescendo.
Authorities caught wind of one of Acuña’s stories on corruption and decided enough was enough. They accused him of hiding a weapon that belonged to the Attorney General’s office. Acuña says he was tortured for 16 hours, waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture.
Crypto Salvation
In 2017, Acuña wiped the slate clean of his tortuous past, entering the wonderfully weird world of crypto, enjoying stints as a public relations officer at payments firm Electroneum, a television producer at BloxLive and most recently another public relations role at DePIN company IOTEX.
His tough background prepared him for the crypto industry, which despite growing acceptance by the traditional finance sector, continues to grapple with the Wild West environment of its early days. While Acuña might not have the most common backstory for those working in crypto, it remains a pertinent reminder that the allure of the crypto industry is not just speculative financial gain: It’s also an industry that checks the power of governments, banks and elites.
Conclusion
Despite losing his life savings, Acuña continues to work in the crypto industry – although he warns that it’s a long way away from going mainstream. The user experience is “anxiety-inducing”, with each transfer inducing anxiety. Unless "we get an application where all your crypto is in that same app, and it doesn’t matter what freaking network it is, you can convert it into whatever you want, to convert it and send it, then I just don’t see it” taking off.
This remains a key hurdle for the industry; tech-savvy millennials know how to buy an asset on Ethereum, bridge it to Solana and buy a memecoin on Pump.fun before sending that to an exchange, but the majority of regular people don’t.