An anonymous online source was recently spotted trying to sell private customer and employee data allegedly obtained from crypto exchange Paxful. A spokesperson from the company told Cointelegraph that no customer data has been jeopardized, however.
“Our customers’ data has not been compromised in any way,” said the spokesperson on Friday. “There has been no data breach of the Paxful platform,” they noted, adding:
“The employee data that the person claims to have was obtained illegally from a third party supplier that Paxful previously used; Paxful terminated its contract with this supplier in September 2020. We have taken measures to ensure that our employees are not impacted by this event and we’re continuing to actively monitor the situation as a precautionary measure.”
On Friday, someone posted a message in a Russian-language Telegram channel titled "Information leaks" that read, "A dump of the database of registered users and employees of the paxful.com P2P cryptocurrency trading platform has been put up for sale on the English-speaking shadow forum.”
The post noted phone numbers, names and addresses as well as other private information that was supposedly apprehended and made available for purchase as part of a “dump” that purportedly boasted more than “4.8 million entries.”
Hacks and data leaks are unfortunately not uncommon in a world growing more accustomed to technology. Facebook recently suffered a hack that compromised the data of more than 500,000 customers. Millions were affected by the notorious Equifax leak of 2017. Crypto hardware wallet company Ledger also suffered data hack troubles in 2020.