The team behind Banana Gun, a Telegram-based trading bot, has announced its plan to fully reimburse victims of the recent $3M hack.
According to the team, the 11 users who were affected by the cyber theft will be refunded from the Banana Gun Treasury.
The team further mentioned that Solana and EVM bots are not active online with no restrictions other than a 2-hour transfer delay.
Banana Gun Telegram Bot Hacked
On Thursday, September 19, the Banana Gun Telegram bot got hacked. The hack targeted crypto veterans and smart money traders.
Some Banana Gun users reported that unauthorized outbound transactions were carried out on their crypto wallets.
Following the report, the team behind Banana Gun sprung into action and switched off its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana bots to prevent further losses.
The Banana Gun’s team explained that the hacker leveraged a vulnerability in the Telegram message oracle to execute the manual crypto transfers. However, the team has informed users that the vulnerability has been patched and that more security measures have been implemented to prevent such occurrences in the future.
At the time of writing, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and Solana bots are back online with no restrictions. However, users would experience a compulsory 2-hour transaction delay, implemented by the team.
Aside from the 2-hour transfer delay, the team revealed that they are adding two-factor authentication (2FA) for all transfers.
Although initial investigations revealed that 36 users were affected by the attack and lost almost $2M worth of ETH, a post-mortem report from the Banana Gun’s team revealed fewer casualties but higher losses.
The team reported that “11 users were affected,” and the hacker stole $3M worth of digital assets from Banana Gun users.
Banana Gun’s Team To Reimburse Victims
A few days after the hack, the team behind the trading bot announced that it would absorb the $3M loss and that all 11 affected users would be fully reimbursed accordingly.
The team clarified that “no tokens will be sold for reimbursements,” instead, victims will be reimbursed from the Banana Gun treasury.
BANANA Surged Following The Announcement
The announcement of the full refund triggered an increase in the price of BANANA, which surged by about 7% over the past 24 hours.
At press time, Banana was trading at over $38.6, having recovered much of the ground lost due to the hack. Also, Banana’s market capitalization has now crossed $130M.
While the hack was a setback for Banana, the token recovered its lost value as confidence returned due to the team’s swift response and compensation for users.
Although cyber theft is a frequent occurrence in the crypto industry, the way the team behind Banana Gun handled the situation rebuilt users’ confidence as well as strengthened the project’s reputation.
WazirX, on the other hand, has been finding it difficult to reimburse its customers since the July hack attack, where the exchange reportedly lost more than $235M.
