A malicious app masquerading as the official Ledger Live software on the Apple App Store has caused a significantly larger damage than expected, as per blockchain sleuth ZachXBT. The pseudonomous researcher, on Tuesday, claimed that this fake Ledger app has managed to steal a whopping $9.5 million. This total exponentially exceeds the $420,000 loss that was recently reported by a Philedelphia-based musician bringing this fake app into notice over the last 48 hours.
ZachXBT published his findings on a Telegram post on Tuesday. He claimed that between April 7 and April 13, the app managed to steal an estimate of $9.5 million from over 50 suspected victims across blockchains including Bitcoin, Tron, Solana, Ripple, and Solana.
While Apple has deleted the app from the App Store, it did manage to cause major financial losses to unsuspecting victims.
In his post, ZachXBT specified that largest single victim loss amounts to $3.23 million that was stolen in the form of USDT tokens. This theft was logged on April 9.
The two other victims, particularly mentioned by ZachXBT, lost $2.07 million and $1.95 million on April 11 and April 8 respectively.
The blockchain sleuth has mentioned the attacker’s wallet addresses, as well as the addresses of the mentioned victims with high losses.
As of now, the identification of the fake app deployer remains unknown.
According to ZachXBT, the KuCoin crypto exchange was used to launder the stolen funds via over 150 deposit addresses. The crypto mixer service, AudiA6, was used to launder these funds.
“Kucoin has seen a sharp increase in illicit activity over the past year. Kucoin was banned from onboarding new EU users by Austrian regulators in February 2026 after only receiving its MiCA permit in November 2025,” his post noted. “Kucoin previously paid fines of $300M+ to the US government to settle its case for violating AML laws in January 2025.”
It remains unclear if the instance could bring Apple face-to-face with a class action lawsuit for failing to filter out a malicious app, disguised as a legitimate one.
The case came to light over the weekend after Garrett Dutton, the Philadelphia-based musician lost 5.9 Bitcoin, roughly amounting to $420,000. Dutton had posted about the incident on April 11 on X. Addressing the same, ZachXBT informed Dutton that his stolen BTC were traced to have been laundered by KuCoin.
While Apple has remained mum on the situation, KuCoin did address the situation.
“Thanks for the heads-up. We’ve flagged this for our AML team to track the 5.92 BTC across the mentioned deposit addresses. We have taken temporary restraining measures and temporarily frozen the suspicious account for seven days,” the exchange said.
Source: X