Decade Of Bitcoin Savings Gone In Minutes After Fake App Fools Musician

Ten years of careful saving wiped out in a single afternoon. That’s what happened to Garrett Dutton, the American musician known as G. Love, who lost 5.9 Bitcoin — worth roughly $420,000 — after a malicious app tricked him into giving away the one thing he was never supposed to share.

A Retirement Fund Built Over Years

Dutton had been stacking Bitcoin since 2017, treating it as a long-term retirement plan. On Saturday, he posted about the loss on X, telling his 67,500 followers the coins had vanished in an instant.

He said he downloaded what appeared to be the Ledger Live app — a self-custody crypto application — from Apple’s App Store on a new MacBook. The app was fake. Once inside, it prompted him to enter his seed phrase. He did. The money was gone.

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced the stolen funds shortly after, finding that the Bitcoin had been moved to deposit addresses tied to the crypto exchange KuCoin across nine separate transactions.

KuCoin responded to ZachXBT’s post with a statement typically addressed to its customers. Dutton did not disclose which link led him to the fraudulent download.

Fake Wallet Apps Have Fooled People Before

This is not the first time scammers have pulled off this exact move. Back in 2023, a counterfeit version of the Ledger Live app appeared on Microsoft’s app store and drained nearly $600,000 from multiple users before it was removed.

Microsoft later acknowledged the app had made it through its review process undetected. Apple had not responded to a request for comment.

Dutton’s case is one piece of a much larger problem. According to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Americans lost more than $11 billion to crypto-related fraud in 2025 — up from $9 billion the year before.

Seed phrases are the master keys of self-custody crypto wallets. No legitimate wallet application asks users to type one into a screen. That’s the line Dutton crossed without realizing it — and by the time he did, there was nothing left to recover.

Featured image from Pexels, chart from TradingView