Bitget CEO Gracy Chen reveals $80K loss from fake interview scam tied to Lazarus Group

Even the CEO of a major crypto exchange isn’t immune to getting scammed. Bitget’s Gracy Chen disclosed that she personally lost approximately $80,000 after falling victim to a social engineering attack disguised as a journalist interview, with the scheme bearing the hallmarks of North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group.

The attack worked by exploiting trust in a familiar channel. Hackers compromised the X (Twitter) account of a well-known crypto media outlet and used it to impersonate journalists, reaching out to Chen under the guise of conducting an interview.

A personal loss alongside a much larger breach

Chen’s $80K personal wallet drain is a painful but comparatively modest figure next to the other number dominating Bitget’s security headlines. The exchange itself suffered a breach resulting in roughly $387.5 million stolen from its cold and warm wallets, an amount initially estimated at $351.6 million before being revised upward.

The exchange-level attack didn’t rely on compromised private keys. Instead, attackers used spoofed transaction data to redirect funds.

Bitget has pointed to its User Protection Fund, valued at over $464 million, as the backstop designed to absorb losses from exactly this kind of incident. Chen’s personal loss, however, fell outside that umbrella. The fund covers exchange users, not the CEO’s own wallet.

Chen drew a direct line between both incidents and the Lazarus Group, the state-sponsored North Korean hacking collective. She identified behavioral patterns and operational signatures consistent with prior Lazarus campaigns, including earlier targeting of her personal wallet that preceded the fake interview attack.

Lazarus Group’s expanding playbook

Impersonating journalists is a particularly effective vector. Crypto executives are accustomed to media outreach, especially during periods of market activity or after major announcements. A message from a recognizable media brand’s verified account asking for an interview doesn’t immediately trigger the same alarm bells as a random DM asking someone to click a suspicious link.

Chen noted connections between the tactics used against her and strategies previously deployed against other major exchanges, including Bybit. The implication is that Lazarus operatives aren’t running isolated attacks. They’re running campaigns, targeting multiple high-profile individuals and institutions with tailored approaches that share underlying methodologies.

What this means for exchange security

The dual nature of Chen’s disclosure, a personal loss and a massive institutional breach happening in proximity, highlights a vulnerability gap that the crypto industry has been slow to address. Exchange security protocols tend to focus on infrastructure: cold storage, multi-signature wallets, transaction monitoring. Human-layer attacks operate in a different dimension entirely.

Bitget’s $464 million User Protection Fund is a meaningful safety net, but the fact that a $387.5 million breach occurred despite existing safeguards raises legitimate questions about the gap between fund size and prevention capability.

Chen’s willingness to publicly disclose her own loss is notable in an industry where executives rarely volunteer information about personal security failures.