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More than 1000 users affected in a cryptocurrency tax reporting service hack

A hacker is selling customer data obtained by hacking an online crypto tax service.

Image by: Richard Patterson / Flickr

Thu, 27 Aug 2020, 05:49 am UTC

A hacker was able to breach CryptoTrader.Tax, an online service for calculating and filing crypto taxes. As a result, data on more than a thousand users was stolen by the hacker.

The hacker targeted the account of a marketing and customer service employee of CryptoTrader.Tax, according to Coindesk. The publication said that its unnamed source came across the hacker on a dark web forum.

The hack exposed the personal data of CyptoTrader.Tax customers such as their names, payment processor profiles, email addresses, and even their messages that sometimes contained their incomes derived from cryptocurrency trading. In a bid to entice buyers of the sensitive data, the hacker even posted screenshots on the forum and sent pictures to Coindesk’s source.

The hacker accessed the account of CoinTrader.Tax’s marketing and customer service employee, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO David Kemmerer. He added that the cybercriminal downloaded a file that contained 13,000 rows of information, which included 1,082 email addresses of the crypto tax service’s customers.

Kemmerer assured that his team already informed the customers affected by the hack. The firm also took measures to further improve the security of its network as well as its monitoring system for internal and third-party apps. CryptoTrader.Tax’s investigation also revealed that its tax filing account password was not breached by the hacker.

CryptoTrader.Tax users had to enter their billing information the payment processor Stripe to pay for their subscriptions. However, Stripe assured that, while its system is connected to the hacked CryptoTrader.Tax support center platform, the link does not reveal sensitive user info such as credit, debit, and banking information as well as the physical addresses of its clients. As such, only customer email addresses and the general location was exposed by the hack.

Kemmerer also revealed that the hacker was able to gain access to the referral numbers, commission earnings, marketing communications, and revenues from affiliates that promote the services of CryptoTrader.Tax on social media.

CryptoTrader.Tax is operated by Kansas City-based Coin Ledger Inc. The online service is capable of importing data from 36 crypto exchanges and use it to automatically compute and generate gains and losses for tax reports. The computation can be exported to the tax preparation software TurboTax.

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