Musician G. Love Loses More Than $420,000 in Bitcoin to Fake Ledger App

Ledger is a hardware wallet that stores the private keys to crypto assets offline. A seed phrase grants the highest level of control over those assets, and the genuine Ledger Live application never asks users to enter it on a computer. The fake app exploited users' trust in Apple App Store reviews and underscored the growing risk of crypto phishing on macOS. Ledger stressed that a seed phrase must never leave the physical device.

U.S. musician Garrett Dutton, who performs as G. Love, downloaded a fake Ledger Live app while setting up his wallet on a new Mac on April 10 and entered his seed phrase. His 5.924 Bitcoin, worth about $420,000 at the time, was stolen immediately. ZachXBT traced the funds through nine transactions to addresses linked to KuCoin. Apple confirmed on April 15 that it had removed the app. More than 50 people lost a combined total of about $9.5 million between April 7 and April 13.