A Crypto Venture Partner Lost Most of His Life Savings in Fake Zoom Call Targeted Phishing
Mehdi Farooq, an investment partner at crypto venture capital firm Hypersphere, revealed Thursday, June 19, that he lost most of his life savings in a targeted phishing attack launched through a spoofed Zoom call, Cointelegraph reported.
Farooq’s post explains that the attack began with a message he received on Telegram from a man he knew as Alex Lin, “who said he wanted to catch up,” Farooq recalls. The two had indeed communicated before, so the contact seemed normal. Farooq then shared his Calendly link with Lin, who set up a meeting for the next day.
A few minutes before the scheduled call, Lin suggested that he needed to switch to Zoom Business for “compliance reasons,” adding that he would be joined by one of his LPs, Kent, a name familiar to Farooq. Farooq was not alerted to the request because he was in the middle of a money management matter at the time.
He later realized that Alex Lin’s real account had been hacked. According to Farooq, the attack was linked to a North Korean organization called ‘dangrouspassword’.