American musician Garrett Dutton, known as “G. Love,” lost his entire Bitcoin retirement fund after downloading a malicious app impersonating Ledger Live from Apple’s App Store and entering his seed phrase.
Dutton told his 67,500 followers on X that he lost 5.9 Bitcoin — worth roughly $420,000 — “in an instant” after spending about 10 years accumulating the coins to secure his retirement.
How the theft unfolded
Dutton said he downloaded the malicious software on his new Apple MacBook Neo but didn’t share which link led him there.
He wrote:
“I been in the crypto circus since 2017. Today they caught me off guard. It was my own damn fault for not being more diligent. But let it serve as a warning. There’s so many scams.”
Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT confirmed the theft, noting that Dutton’s Bitcoin had been sent to deposit addresses linked to KuCoin across nine transactions.
A recurring scam tactic
Fake Ledger app scams are not new.
In 2023, nearly $600,000 worth of Bitcoin was stolen from users who downloaded a fraudulent Ledger Live application from Microsoft’s app store.
Microsoft acknowledged the malicious app had bypassed its review process and removed it shortly after.
Cointelegraph was unable to find the fake Ledger app on Apple’s App Store at the time of writing, and Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Broader crypto fraud context
The incident comes as crypto-related fraud continues to rise.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation reported this week that Americans lost over $11 billion from crypto-related incidents in 2025, up from $9 billion the previous year.
