Retired Artist Loses $2M in Elaborate Coinbase Impersonation Scam

Another day, another crypto horror story—this time with a side of shattered retirement dreams. A retired artist just got swindled out of $2 million by a scammer posing as a Coinbase support agent. Because nothing says ’financial revolution’ like grifters exploiting trust in broad daylight.

How it went down: The victim received a call from someone claiming to be from Coinbase’s ’security team,’ warning of suspicious activity on their account. Classic fear-mongering playbook—and it worked.

The twist: The scammer didn’t just drain the wallet; they walked the victim through setting up a ’secure’ new wallet... which, surprise, was controlled by the fraudster. Poof—life savings gone faster than a meme coin’s liquidity.

Why this matters: Even as institutions push for mainstream adoption, these scams keep proving that crypto’s wild west phase isn’t over. And no, ’DYOR’ isn’t a sufficient defense when targeting retirees.

Meanwhile, traditional finance brokers are somewhere quietly sipping tea—and charging their 1% management fees.

• Retired artist Ed Suman was scammed out of over $2 million in cryptocurrency after a fake Coinbase representative convinced him to enter his seed phrase into a fake website.
• Crypto scam investigator Nano Baiter exposed how scammers trick victims to tea after their funds by pretending to be exchange support agents.

A retired artist was recently scammed out of $2 million in a devastating crypto scheme orchestrated by a fake Coinbase representative.

Retired artist Ed Suman lost more than $2 million in crypto earlier this year after being tricked by someone pretending to be a Coinbase helper. The artist, who had spent time building his career and making some of his famous art pieces, like Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog sculptures, started to move his fortune to cryptocurrency.

Over time, he had saved over 17.5 Bitcoin and 225 Ether, and he kept it safely in a Trezor Model One wallet. In March, he received a messageng to be from someone who claimed to be from Coinbase. According to the message, the sender warned him about some suspicious activity going on in his wallet. After replying, he got a call from Brett Miller, the man who claimed to be from the Coinbase safety team. 

According to details, it was said that the caller knew Suman used a hardware wallet, so he tried to convince him. He convinced Suman that his wallet might still be at risk and guided him through a fake security step, which led Suman to enter his secret recovery phrase into a lookalike site.

How Hackers Use Coinbase and Binance for Theft

Before this recent attack came to light, a crypto scam investigator, Nano Baiter, wrote a thread on X showing how crypto scammers make use of Coinbase and Binance to deceive crypto investors. He acted like a fake user and told the scammer he needed help setting up the Coinbase wallet on his laptop.

The scammer first asked how much was in his Coinbase account. Next, he lied that my profiles had been hacked. Then he claimed that they should link the account to the “Coinbase secure server,” which was actually just a remote access tool like AnyDesk. 

Once the hacker had full control of Baiter’s VIRTUAL machine, he lied to him that all the funds in that account were at risk of being stolen by hackers and he needed to move ALL the funds to a new secure wallet, which he later used to access the hacker’s system.

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