Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: $490K Swindle
A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last.
For clarity, I used to work for Canonical on the Snapcraft team, but I no longer do. Now, I’m just some community guy who wants Ubuntu and Snapcraft to be a success. I’m writing this in the hope Canonical will fix its processes so reputation-damaging events like this don’t keep happening.
All of the words below are based on my external perspective of what happened. However, I have also drawn on my historic internal knowledge of the processes and how we dealt with this in the past. Though things may have changed in the two years since I left the company.