One in seven German numbers on a leaked list belonged to a crypto trader

Rapid7 Labs uncovered Operation ASTERIX, a crypto fraud pipeline that leveraged AI coding assistants to create fake Ledger, Trezor, and Exodus apps.

It matched 43,066 phone numbers to actual exchange accounts. Any user who self-custodies their crypto is a potential target. The operation was still ongoing when researchers discovered it.

A misconfigured server gave up the whole playbook

An exposed web directory was discovered by Rapid7 researchers Anna Širokova and Jan Recinsky on campaign infrastructure. Inside were the raw ingredients of a live fraud operation.

The pair’s August 17 report detailed the data trove, which included phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, the fake wallet applications themselves, and code to siphon stolen data out through Telegram.

Most of that tooling was still in use or in development when it leaked. Rapid7 said it could reach out to providers and authorities, including Apple’s security team, while the campaign was happening.

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