BadBuzz: IRA Financial Hacked for $36M in Bitcoin and Ethereum

Hi HODLers,

Today I could have written about Crypto Superbowl ads or Canadian Trucker situation with J.Trudeau basically cutting the movement from financial access and treating them as Al-Qaeda or ISIS.

But I figured you probably read 10 articles on this topic either here on Hive/Leofinance or on Web2 Crypto News sources !

Therefore, I went to my go to news: The Hack of the day!

This one is particularly sad as it concerns IRAs.

What is an IRA?:

An individual retirement account (IRA) is a savings account with tax advantages that individuals can open to save and invest in the long term.

What happened?

Hackers stole $21 million in Bitcoin and $15 million in Ethereum from retirement accounts held with IRA Financial Trust on February 8

This is an information from an anonymous source who communicated it to Bloomberg news.

These accounts weere held by IRA Financial Trus on the Gemini exchange. They have been holding off until recently on a potential hack:

"Our investigation is ongoing, but a preliminary assessment indicates an attempted theft of cryptocurrency funds within the impacted accounts occurred. We are proactively utilizing all available resources to recover the funds."

Another hack, so what? Well, this one is different.

This one is different for one main reason, it is an IRA investing in Bitcoin and therefore it has been promoted to let's say; less tech-savvy individuals. Probably investors in their 50's+ who read some news about Bitocin a while back and thought: 'Why not! I can put it in my IRA, it might just give me a nicer retirement'.

This is the issue, this is one thing to lose it all when you are 20-30 years old, it is another to lose your life savings just before entiring retirement.

It makes me feel awful just to think about it. I truly hope either this Fintech, Gemini or law enforcement will find a way to cover the funds of these investors.

N.B.: Gemini has not been hacked in any way as their Communication Head stated:

"Gemini’s systems have not been hacked or compromised in any way. We are aware that IRA Financial experienced a security incident last week and have offered assistance to IRA Financial in their investigation. While IRA Financial’s accounts are serviced on the Gemini platform, Gemini does not manage the security of IRA Financial’s systems."

Let's hope they find a way to get the money back or at least reimburse investors.

Stay safe out there, this is the Wild West...

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