Polymarket hacked: $1.4 million in losses reported

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This Thursday at 6:45 p.m. French time, a trader known on X under the pseudonym Car raised the alarm after discovering suspicious transactions on his Polymarket account.

If you are a Polymarket user, secure your account. I just got taken out of $800,000.

He said a friend also lost $600,000, bringing the reported losses to $1.4 million. However, these amounts have not been independently verified.

In a second message, Car claims that all his positions were sold without his knowledge. He nevertheless claims to have managed to withdraw a large part of his funds before the hacker took them.

When a provider is compromised, funds left on a platform are exposed. A hardware wallet allows you to keep your cryptos outside of these services.

Minutes after the first alert, Polymarket reported a major outage and suspended trading. Users could still cancel their orders, but could no longer buy or sell. The platform also temporarily deactivated its relayer, a service responsible for transmitting certain transactions on the blockchain.

We've identified & fixed an issue impacting our international platform, Polymarket⁠.com. One of our 3rd party providers was compromised, and we have referred this to relevant law enforcement.

Polymarket subsequently confirmed that an external service provider had been compromised, without specifying which one. The company claims to have identified and corrected the problem, while alerting the relevant authorities.

It promises to fully reimburse affected users and announced a resumption of exchanges in the evening. The number of victims and the total amount stolen remain unknown.

French users are not concerned in theory, since the Polymarket platform is banned in France, which Polymarket is contesting in court.

This is not the first time that Polymarket has been the victim of a breach by a service provider. In June, hackers injected malicious code into its site to trick some users into authorizing fraudulent transfers.

According to analyzes by PeckShield and Bubblemaps, approximately $3 million in pUSD was then stolen from fewer than 15 accounts. The platform's smart contracts had not been compromised. Polymarket had already promised to fully reimburse the victims.

This new attack comes two days after a similar incident at Predict.fun. The competing prediction market confirmed the theft of approximately 400,000 USDT from its users' wallets, also following a possible compromise of an external service.

Machine-translated from French