A group of crypto investors have initiated a collective lawsuit against Atomic Wallet, which suffered a significant breach in June resulting in $100 million in losses. Atomic Wallet has not fully disclosed the reasons behind the breach and claims that the number of affected users is low. The lawsuit involves lawyers attempting to compensate their clients for their losses.
$100 Million Lawsuit
The lawsuit is coordinated by German lawyer Max Gutbrod and Boris Feldman, co-founder of legaltech firm Destra Legal in Moscow. Gutbrod, a partner at Baker & McKenzie in Moscow for over twenty years, claims to represent approximately 50 clients who lost a total of $12 million following the breach of Atomic Wallet two months ago.
“We are working to recover our clients’ assets and will file a collective lawsuit against Atomic Wallet. They did not provide any information about the attack to our clients or report it to the police.”
Atomic Wallet, an unsupervised cryptocurrency wallet, suffered a massive $100 million exploit in mid-June 2023. The breach affected at least 5,500 crypto accounts on the platform. Crypto analysis firms such as Elliptic later attributed the heist to the Lazarus Group, a North Korean cybercrime group believed to be responsible for stealing billions of cryptocurrencies through various thefts.
Atomic Wallet Maintains Silence
While initial reports held Lazarus accountable for the attack on Atomic Wallet, new allegations suggest another perpetrator. According to Feldman, it is more likely that a Ukrainian group orchestrated the attack. Destra, in collaboration with blockchain analytics at Match Systems, is conducting their own investigation on behalf of investors. Feldman stated, “They found traces indicating the involvement of Ukrainian hacker groups.”
As previously reported, Atomic Wallet did not disclose the exact conditions that led to the exploit in June. The company only presented four “possible” reasons, including a virus on user devices, infrastructure breaches, a man-in-the-middle attack, or malicious code injection. Atomic Wallet also reiterated that less than 0.1% of application users were affected and that the cryptocurrency wallet continues to operate as usual.
