Popular initial coin offering (ICO) investor and YouTube influencer Ian Balina has reported on Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram that he has been hacked.
The hack may have been initiated during a live ICO-review broadcast Balina hosted last night on Youtube.
In it, Balina responded to a notice prompting him to sign back in to his Google account in order to save changes to the spreadsheet he was using during the livestream.
Shortly after attending to the matter, Balina ended the live broadcast.
“I have to get going.”
Sources estimate Balina may have lost the almost two million dollars of Ether and other coins in the hack.
Within two-and-a-half hours of terminating the livestream, Balina’s social media posts regarding the hack began to appear:
https://twitter.com/DiaryofaMadeMan/status/985790965842698240
Balina asked for help tracking coins being transmitted out of six Etherscan wallets and stated that the hacker was attempting to sell the stolen coins on the Hong Kong-based Kucoin exchange.
Hackers may have accessed Balina’s password-protected encryption keys by hacking into his Evernote after hacking his email.
Known for intimately documenting his process of ICO investing for many followers, Balina regularly posts blockfolio snapshots on social media and, until recently, made his ICO spreadsheet available to the public.
Balina embarked on ICO investing after working with data and in sales for prominent firms like IBM. He produced a data-based system for evaluating ICO projects that he calls “token metrics,” a system the claims improved his ICO returns five-fold.
On January 23, 2018, Balina told hosts of the Australian TODAY show that he turned an initial ninety-thousand dollar investment in cryptocurrencies into more than $4 million dollars last year.