Trezor One Wallets Forgery Reveals New Techniques Used to Steal Crypto

Though the company's officials acknowledged that "Trezor clones have been released over the years," a "Fake Trezor device, manufactured by a different, unknown vendor" has become a "Startling" discovery for them.

As explained in the "How to distinguish" guidelines in the same blog post, the real Trezor One device bears a different name and is manufactured by legitimate companies, while the fake device replicates the original's outward appearance to fool potential buyers.

Those customers, who are used to buying electronic devices on such platforms as Amazon or eBay, could have been confronted with an offer to purchase a "Used just once" or "Opened but never used" Trezor One wallet.

These claims were questioned when, in mid-August 2017, a group of hackers managed to crack Trezor wallets using relatively simple methods, allowing for the theft or identification of private keys from those devices.

After an investigation into the incident, Trezor stated that the seed for the hacked wallet's private key was saved on a flash memory card and relocated to the afflicted device's random access memory during its use.

Cracking PINsAs a rule, in case the hardware device is lost or falls into the hands of a bad actor, manufacturers like Trezor and the Ledger reset the wallet if a wrong pin is entered three times.

Originally, a Trezor hardware device is protected with branded holographic stickers and super glue which holds the housing together.

Community's reactionThe community responded to the news about faked Trezor One devices with a mix of outrage and frustration peppered by some understanding.

Given the fact that today, the majority of cryptocurrencies are held in cold storage, and 97 percent of exchanges prefer to keep the funds this way, the forgery of devices for crypto storage may still remain attractive for fraudsters, according to a study issued by the University of Cambridge.

Trezor November 20, 2018 Apart from the main warning given here and there by Trezor - "If you don't own your private keys, you don't own your coins" - some experts advise having two cold wallets and not to keep all the funds in one place to diversify the risks.