Have you ever woke up one morning missing $200,000 and all of your cryptocurrency? No? Team Liquid superstar bot lane carry Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng has, according to his YouTube video on Friday.
The incident occurred a few weeks ago, according to the video, and Doublelift said that the alleged thief kicked off the heist by calling cell carrier T-Mobile and impersonating him.
The goal was, apparently, to get T-Mobile to transfer Doublelift’s phone number to their own device, which would give them access to his Coinbase account, an online service for purchasing and managing cryptocurrency. From what Doublelift said, it worked, and soon his bank account was overdrawn and his cryptocurrency was missing.
Coinbase users have the option to tie their bank account to the service, allowing them to then purchase and sell currency more quickly. Doublelift’s account had this feature enabled, and that’s how the thief was able to drain his account so quickly.
The heist was weeks in the making, too. Doublelift said that he suspects the crook pulled off the number swap a while ago, when he had begun to experience serious issues with his cell service. After calling T-Mobile to resolve it, he just assumed something goofy had happened and that nothing nefarious was afoot. Meanwhile, the criminal was setting up email filters to hide all Coinbase transactions from Doublelift and simultaneously forwarding them all to a hidden email.
The criminal in question was very thorough, but Doublelift said that he believes he’ll get the money back after his bank concludes the fraud investigation. There’s a lesson to be learned here—if you work at T-Mobile, don’t believe people claiming to be Doublelift.
