🚨COINBASE SUFFERS DATA HACK! $20M BITCOIN RANSOM & JUDGE TORRES BLOCKING SEC RIPPLE XRP RESOLUTION!

into it. Hey, everybody, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host, Tony Edward. On your weight and please sit that subscribe button as well as the thumbsup button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify or Apple, please leave a five star rating and review. Folks. Breaking news. Coinbase has suffered a data breach.

So essentially, if you are a coinbase customer, your name, address, phone number, email address and other data has been leaked now Coinbase. They tweeted out the following saying cyber criminals bribed and recruited rogue overseas support agents to pull personal data on less than one percent of coinbase customers. No passwords, private keys, or funds were exposed. Crime accounts are untouched.

We will reimburse impacted customers now, They continued here, saying we will pursue the harshest penalties possible and will not pay the twenty million dollar ransom demand we received. Instead, we are establishing a twenty million dollar reward fund for information leading to the arrests and conviction of the criminals responsible for this attack. Folks, this is not good. However, Coinbase is going to reimburse the customers who lost their funds.

Last week. I told you, guys, I've been getting a lot of spam calls, spam emails, spam texts of saying my coinbase account was hacked, and much more. And when I reported that to you guys, I told you to be careful, don't click on anything, don't get emotional, don't panic if you get those texts, because they are created in a way to trigger you and to get an emotional response where you don't think first, right, And unfortunately

a lot of people fell for this. In fact, the reports are coming out that coinbased customers lost three hundred million dollars through these social engineering scams. And last week I reported that on chain sleuth zach xbt was reporting about forty five million dollars was lost. Will that number increase?

So if you are a coin based user and you were getting those texts and emails and getting bombarded, this is the reason why this data was leaked by the overseas customer support person or persons, and unfortunately this is really bad and Coinbase CEO shout out to him though, Brian Armstrong. He put out a video addressing it, and let me play a clip for you here.

to share at the end of this video. But for the rest of you watching, wondering what happened. We did an investigation here, and these attackers have been approaching our overseas customer support agents looking for a weak link, someone who would accept a bribe in exchange for sharing some customer information with them. Now, our support tools have limited

access to customer information. There was no passwords or private keys or funds accessed as part of this, but customer support agents do have access to personal information like name data, birth address, etc. And attackers still want access to this information because it allows them to conduct social engineering attacks where they can call our customers impersonating coinbased customer support and try to trick them into sending their funds to

the attacker. And unfortunately they were able to find a few bad apples. Our systems are designed to mitigate the impact of something like this, so less than one percent of our monthly transacting users had their records accessed. But this is still unacceptable and I want to tell you what we're doing about it. So first, any customers that were socially engineered as a result of this incident, we're going to reimburse them. There's more details on our website

on our blog posts about the reimbursement process. You can read more. There any customers who have been impacted by this or have been notified at this point. Number two, we're hardening our systems around customer support to make something like this much more difficult in the future. And third, we're actually relocating some of our customer support operations as

a result of this. But the last step is maybe the most important, which is that instead of paying this twenty million dollar ransom, we're turning it around and we're putting out a twenty million dollar award for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of these attackers. For these would be extortionists or anyone seeking to harm coinbased customers know that we will prosecute you and bring you to justice. And now you have my answer.

and reporting them as spam. And if I have any concern or questions, I go directly to my coin base account. Now many of you know I believe in self custody. I put the majority of my crypto on hardware wallets, and I've been on the record saying this for years and years and years. Don't leave your coins on the exchanges. And I'm a user of the Treasure Save five. This is a beautiful hardware wallet that makes it easy to safely store your crypto. Treasure is a sponsor of this podcast,

but I think it's timely here. So if you are keeping all your coins on an exchange, I highly recommend you get a hardware wallet like the Treasure Save five. Put your coins on here and put it in a safe in your home or a safety deposit box. And guess what, you can sleep at night. You don't have to worry. I do have exchange accounts because I swing trade, so I have a little bit of a crypto on the exchanges like coinbas and others, and I swing trade.

But the major already of my holdings are on hardware wallets, folks, and the private keys are backed up and all that stuff, so I can sleep at night. If anybody tries to go into my coin miss account, you're not going to get anything like, Okay, you got some money, but you're not getting like all my crypto holdings. So this is why I use Treasure folks. And they've been at this since twenty thirteen. They're the ones that created the hardware wallet.

It's open source and they support all the major coins Bitcoin, xrpiece of On and so forth, even new coins like black Rocks Biddle. So I highly recommend folks that you get a hardware wallet, and you can get a five percent discount by using the code thinking crypto all one word. So check out the link in the description to learn about Treasure's products. So, folks, keep an eye out, watch

your emails. Don't click on stuff that look fishy. Make sure you double check those emails, and obviously you don't. If you pick up a call and they say they're from coinbase, immediately block the hell out of it. And those texts that come through. Don't click on anything, don't call it anything. Just reported as spam and blocked in numbers. That is what I've been doing to protect yourself. Now,

this could happen to other exchanges. As well crack in and others because this was not a breach of the security system, but essentially they compromise an employee overseas, and they probably gave them a ton of money, right, more than they usually make because many of them are probably making minimum wage just answering calls and stuff like that. So it really sucks. But I hope the crypto industry is able to use the blockchain technology and start putting

different data on the blockchain where it can't be compromised. Right, it has to be multiple layers of security, so hopefully we can get there. But this really sucks. I mean, just protect yourself and watch out. Again. It can happen to other exchanges as well, and I have accounts with all the major exchanges uphold crackincrypto dot com because I

use them as on and off ramps. If one exchange or two exchanges go down they're having issues due to traffic, I can go to other exchanges, so that's why I have these accounts. So just be careful, folks, and watch out even for regular mail, because these scammers have your physical address. They can send you mail and tell you to do stuff, So just watch out, be careful. Be skeptical of anything. And if you get something that says, oh, you just lost your funds or whatever, don't panic, don't

have any emotional reaction. Slow down, take a deep breath, and then slowly go through the process and double check everything, and don't click on links, right, Just go directly to the app or the website and log in, and just check everything first before you go down any path of calling anybody or clicking on any links. It's very important, folks.

It would really suck to lose your funds. But shout out to coinbase that they are going to reimburse folks who have lost their funds, and they're going after these scammers and they're putting out the reward out there. All right.

Moving ahead, huge update. MasterCard has partnered with moonpay and this is to enable stable coin payments and spending at one hundred and fifty million global businesses. We are seeing all the big credit card companies integrating stable coins. Visa is doing the same thing with USDC. And what's interesting, MasterCard is using USDT. The card itself has USDT branded on it. What a time to be alive. We are seeing incredible adoption of crypto from tradified giants, whether you're banks,

credit card companies, stock exchange, and much more. MasterCard tweeted out stable coins meet one hundred and fifty million plus checkout counters, Enterprises and FinTechs can now offer MasterCard branded cards linked to consumers stable coin balances, unlocking new ways to pay and be paid. In partnership with Moonpay, we're combining our trusted global payments network and advanced stable coin infrastructure to bring seamless, secure digital assets payments to life. Folks.

This is why I'm bullish. You are just seeing capitulation on many fronts. You know, years ago many of the folks that these companies were saying this is not then blockchain blah blah blah, crypto blah blah blah. Now they're all in a race to adopt the technology. It's incredible. This, this paradigm shift continues to amaze me. Moving ahead, we

have a big company out in Brazil that is adding bitcoin to its treasury and I've been saying this trend is not going to die down, and it's a global movement where these companies are adding bitcoin to their balance sheet to protect their cash reserves and to grow it as well to outpace debasement and inflation. So meluse if I'm saying that right buys twenty eight point four million

dollars a bitcoin, becoming Brazil's first bitcoin treasury company. You're going to see a lot of companies in different countries, do their folks okay? Moving ahead? Some not so good news.

In the SEC versus Ripple case, many of you know the SEC and Ripple have settled. XRP was deemed not a security intrinsically by Judge Torres, and this case is pretty much wrapped up. However, Judge Torres is not making it easy for both the SEC and Ripple to fix this. So Judge Torres has denied a party's motion for an indicative ruling, saying if jurisdiction were restored to this court,

the court would deny the party's motion as procedurally improper. Now, Attorney fred Rispoli said, the meeting here is that the parties didn't request relief under the right rule of civil procedure, so they will refile it under the correct rule. But me reading between the lines is that Ripple and the SEC need to get on all fours and beg for relief. So they're going to have to really get the judge to address this now. Is this something detrimental to the

market or XRP. Of course not, because xrp's been moving without all of this stuff being done, even before we got this news. Because the market already sees the direction we're heading in. The settlement is there with the SEC, so there's no dark cloud and worry and ambiguity and all that, right, and the SEC lost when it comes to is XRP intrinsically a security And that was the major issue, right. Secondary sales are not security, So it's

clear as day out there. But you want to get all the legal loose ends tied up, which is things like this. But the good thing is the SEC's working with Ripple, so it's not like the SEC's going against Ripple. Eleanor Turrett says, after speaking with my three legal sources and tuning into John Deeton's live analysis, my read is that Judge Torres is playing hardball here. She's not making it easy for the party so simply walk away. Instead,

she'll make them work for it. Deaton raises a valid point from Taurus's perspective, the SEC has spent the last or the past five years, doubling down on a narrative and legal stress that resulted in thousands of hours of legal and judicial manpower, only for the agency to suggest

that those five years were essentially a waste. While Torres has denied their initial requests, she's outlined a clear path forward provided the SEC in Ripple can meet the legal standards and presents a compelling case that withdrawing her ruling is in the best interests of the public and institutional buyers of XORP. Stuart Olleradi, which is Ripple's chief legal officer, mentioned Ripple will work with the SEC to revisit the

issue together. Pretty while considering they've been on opposite sides for nearly five years, it'll be even more interesting to see if Torres eases up once they've done the necessary work, or if she sticks to her guns and makes this even more of a political fight. So this could be a little bit messy. I do think that she will ultimately do with the right thing here, because if the SEC's working Ripple and you know, I think they'll do.

But as Attorney Fred Wispoli was saying, they're gonna have to beg They're gonna put some work in right, they're gonna have to come in and saying please Judge, please write and keep at it. But I think, guys, this thing is done right. It's just tying up the loose ends and eventually Judge tourists will get there. But just an FYI on what's happening here now, this is interesting

Dave Portnoy. Now, I don't take financial advice from Dave Portnoy, But the reason why I'm sharing this with you he was at Consensus and the information he's putting out there is for the masses essentially, not for us who are educated and do our research.

two dollars, two bucks forty cents? What if that's the next bigcoin. Let me play the clip here for you.

I have some grand belief in it. But it's what two bucks forty cents or something like that is, Like what if that's the next bitpoint? So fomo I think plays a huge part.

how XRP has performed. And I've been seeing a lot of retail fomo as he mentioned, So it's interesting and I do believe XRP will continue to do well in this bull market for many different reasons, but fomo certainly one of them. So, folks, that's the news. Let me know what you think. I know it's not all great news, and the coin based news is a bummer, but you know, at least they're doing the right thing and making customers whole and so forth. So folks, let me know what

you think. Leave your thoughts and comments below. A great way you can support me if you appreciate this content is by subscribing to my free email newsletter. It's one hundred percent free. Also check out my book on Amazon, it's available in paperback, in digital, and my course at mycryptocurse dot com. Folks, thank you for watching listening. I appreciate you all, and I'll talk to you all later.