A former Coinbase customer service agent was arrested in India for helping hackers earlier this year steal sensitive customer information from a company database.
The arrest occurred in Hyderabad, the capital of India’s Telangana state and a major technology center in the country, and it is expected that more individuals will be detained, according to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
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Coinbase is a major American cryptocurrency exchange and financial services company that enables cryptocurrency trading and provides digital wallet services. It has over 100 million registered users across 100 countries and facilitates quarterly trading volume of more than $235 billion.
In May 2025, the company announced that rogue customer support agents had given access to hackers who demanded a $20 million ransom to not publish information stolen from a compromised database.
Coinbase later specified that the incident had affected about 69,500 customers, exposing their names, dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers (SSNs), physical addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.
For some customers, the stolen information also included scanned documents relating to “know your customer” (KYC) processes.
In June, Coinbase provided an update on the incident, stating that the breach had occurred through TaskUs, a customer support outsourcing firm based in India, whose employees were bribed by hackers to gain access to the systems.
In a comment to BleepingComputer, TaskUs said that the incident involved only two individuals and that they shut down the entire department of 226 employees.
News of a customer support agent being arrested follows shortly after charges against a Brooklyn-based scammer, Ronald Spektor, 23, who was accused of impersonating Coinbase to steal funds from unsuspecting customers.
Victims were told that their accounts had been hacked and that they needed to move their digital assets to a “safe” wallet to protect them. In reality, they transferred their money to Spektor’s wallet.
Through this scheme, Spektor made $16 million from 100 victims, and only $605,000 has been recovered.
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