Musician loses $420K Bitcoin ‘retirement fund’ via fake Ledger app

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said Garrett Dutton’s 5.9 Bitcoin has already been sent to deposit addresses associated with KuCoin.

Garrett Dutton, an American musician better known as “G. Love,” said he lost $420,000 worth of Bitcoin after installing a malicious app impersonating the self-custody crypto app Ledger Live from Apple’s App Store and entering his seed phrase.

“I had a really tough day,” Dutton told his 67,500 followers in a post on X on Saturday, adding that he lost his 5.9 Bitcoin (BTC) stash “in an instant” after spending about 10 years accumulating the coins to secure his retirement.

In a follow-up post, crypto sleuth ZachXBT said that Dutton’s Bitcoin has been sent to deposit addresses linked to the crypto exchange KuCoin across nine transactions. KuCoin replied to the post with a statement typically addressed to customers.

The incident highlights a continued problem that bad actors have posed in the crypto industry. On Tuesday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that Americans lost over $11 billion from crypto-related incidents in 2025, up from the $9 billion recorded the previous year.

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Dutton said he was tricked into sharing his seed phrase after downloading the malicious software on his new Apple MacBook Neo but didn’t share which link he used.

“I been in the crypto circus since 2017. Today they caught me off guard. It was my own damn fault for not being more diligent. But let it serve as a warning. There's so many scams,” he added.

Cointelegraph was unable to find the fake Ledger app on Apple's App Store at the time of writing. Cointelegraph reached out to Apple for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Scammers have been adopting this fake Ledger app strategy since at least 2023.

That year, almost $600,000 worth of Bitcoin was stolen from several users who downloaded a fake Ledger Live application from Microsoft’s app store.

Microsoft admitted that the malicious app had bypassed its review process and took it down shortly after.

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Source: CoinTelegraph