Trader Loses 80 Bitcoin (BTC) Worth $6.6 Million Through New Ledger Wallet

80 Bitcoin Vanish From a 10-Day-Old Ledger

A crypto trader lost 80 Bitcoin (BTC), about $6.6 million at Friday’s prices, in a single transfer, and the coins had rested for only ten days on the hardware wallet bought to guard them. Public Bitcoin records on the mempool explorer show the full 80 BTC reaching the wallet on September 29 and leaving in one transaction at 05:54 UTC on October 9. Blockchain tracker Lookonchain reports the device was a new Ledger hardware wallet purchased from CryptoBilis, a reseller based in Southeast Asia, and that the trader acquired the coins roughly four months earlier at about $65,000 each, a total near $5.2 million. Hours after the theft surfaced, Ledger ordered CryptoBilis to halt sales while its team investigates the missing funds, and it told recent buyers to hold off setting up their devices. With the Bitcoin price trading above $83,000 when the transfer hit, the position carried roughly $1.38 million in unrealized profit that vanished with the coins. The sum is large even by the standards of a seasoned crypto whale, and it lands squarely on the self-custody side of Bitcoin (BTC) holding. A hardware wallet, unlike a hot wallet, is designed to keep private keys fully offline, which is why a drain from a ten-day-old unit raises immediate questions about the device itself rather than the network. The same block that carried the trader’s 80 BTC also moved at least six other large transfers into addresses blockchain analysts connect to the drain, a pattern our reading of the on-chain trail suggests was no coincidence.

The Drain Estimate Passes $80 Million

The individual loss is only part of a wider event. Arkham, the blockchain analytics firm, put losses above $80 million across the incident and said the root cause remains unconfirmed. MistTrack, the tracking service operated by security firm SlowMist, went higher, placing the total as far as $90 million. MistTrack also noted that Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, has frozen USDT sitting at addresses linked to the theft, a step available to the issuer because it controls its own token contract. Bitcoin (BTC) offers no equivalent freeze switch, so the stolen coins themselves remain movable. The breadth of the connected transfers is what turns one trader’s bad Friday into a full investigation: analysts tie the addresses that received those other large payments to the same drain, pointing to multiple victims rather than a single compromised passphrase. Ledger has not yet said whether any devices were tampered with; the company has committed to sharing updates as its investigation progresses. Our earlier report on the case, Ledger Probes $86M Bitcoin (BTC) Theft Linked to Reseller CryptoBilis, tracked the reseller halt as it unfolded. The industry context adds pressure. In August, a Coldcard firmware bug allowed thieves to drain roughly $70 million in Bitcoin, making this the second major hardware-wallet scare of the year and the second time buyers of new devices have been told to pause setup.

A Supply-Chain Question, Not an On-Chain One

The six other large transfers riding in the same block argue for a coordinated drainer campaign rather than a lone mishap, and the supply chain through CryptoBilis is the thread investigators will keep pulling until Ledger can confirm or rule out device tampering. Recovery odds look thin. Tether’s freeze can strand any USDT parked at the linked addresses, but Bitcoin itself cannot be frozen, and stolen coins are typically consolidated and cycled through a crypto mixer, a service that scrambles transaction trails to obscure their origins. The mempool record of the 05:54 UTC sweep remains the primary evidence base, and every movement from the linked addresses is now traceable in real time. Until Ledger publishes its findings, the practical posture among security desks is to leave newly purchased devices from the affected distribution channel unconfigured and wait for the company’s official update.