Brazilian Crypto Trading Platform Atlas Suffers Hack, 261,000 Users’ Personal Data Stolen

As reported by YouTube channel Investimentos Digitais, the data of over 200,000 investors has been stolen in a hack on Brazilian cryptocurrency trading platform Atlas Quantum.

According to Have I Been Pwned, a data breach reporting website, 261,000 users had their data leaked, with information “including their names, phone numbers, email addresses and account balances.” No currencies were stolen.

Digital Data Theft

Shortly after the hack, CEO of Atlas Quantum Rodrigo Marques released an update on Facebook. The original post is in Portuguese, so we’ve (roughly) translated the essential parts for your convenience:

“We are conducting an investigation together with our information security advisory, to understand the incident in more detail and we will collaborate with the proper authorities. We would like to point out that this is not a theft of the bitcoins in custody or violation of our Exchange accounts. However, information was exposed from our customer base. At the time of the incident, we take immediate steps to protect the database and passwords and private keys remain encrypted. We are monitoring the affected accounts and working to have additional protection against fraud. Some features of the platform have been temporarily disabled, as a precaution, as we need to ensure security. We’ll communicate when they’re reactivated.”

The post then provided phone numbers and e-mails to contact.

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Hundreds of BTC Revealed

Brazilian publication Portal do Bitcoin confirmed the validity of the leaked data via a user with around 21 Bitcoin (BTC) stored on Atlas. According to the list, there are users such as the CEO of Stratum, Rocelo Lee, and journalist Leandro Narloch who were affected. Some traders had hundreds of BTC stored on the platform, with even Atlas themselves keeping 792 on there.

The story doesn’t stop here, however. CCN reports that Atlas is a company with a troubled history. The platform claims to reward investors via arbitrage, using a bot to grow users earnings between exchanges.

An anonymous source told CCN that Brazilians consider Atlas Quantum to be a Ponzi scheme, promising 3% monthly ROI regardless of the market conditions. Bitconnect was shut down earlier this year after receiving a cease-and-desist due to similar practices, as was Turkish “national cryptocurrency” Turcoin.