Ten years of careful savings disappeared overnight. This is what happened to American musician Garrett Dutton, known as G. Love. He lost 5.9 bitcoins, worth about $420,000, after a malicious app tricked him into handing over one thing he should never have shared.
A retirement fund built over many years.
Dutton has been building Bitcoin as a long-term retirement plan since 2017. On Saturday, he posted about the loss of X, telling his 67,500 followers that the coins were gone in an instant.
Garrett Dutton, aka G Love. Source: The Ark
He said he downloaded what appeared to be the Ledger Live app, a self-custodial cryptocurrency application, from the Apple App Store on his new MacBook. The app was fake. Once inside, he was prompted to enter his seed phrase. He did. The money is gone.
“I’ve been part of the cryptocurrency circus since 2017,” he wrote in a follow-up post. “They caught me off guard today. It was my fault for not being more diligent. But take this as a warning: There are too many scams.”
After tracking down the stolen funds, blockchain investigator ZachXBT discovered that the bitcoins had been moved to deposit addresses linked to cryptocurrency exchange KuCoin in nine separate transactions.
I had a really hard day today. I lost my retirement savings due to hacking/fraud when I converted. @ledger I went to my new computer and accidentally downloaded a malicious Ledger app. @apologize store. All my BTC was gone in an instant.
— G. Love (@glove) April 11, 2026
KuCoin responded to ZachXBT’s post with a statement typically delivered to customers. Dutton did not disclose which link led him to the fraudulent download.
Image: Da-kuk via Getty Images
Fake wallet apps have fooled people before.
This isn’t the first time scammers have taken this exact step. In 2023, a counterfeit version of the Ledger Live app appeared in the Microsoft App Store and defrauded several users of nearly $600,000 before being removed.
hello. We traced the stolen 5.92 BTC, all of which was laundered through: @kucoincom Deposit address for the following transactions:
6f5c8eb6b01774626f33527e0cb03c0d1860447acacd6079e69bf41b459bcf1f
9ee1288f941b2c3775ebd125eefeebdc713aa160bf2cf9d18661fd07f84ce891…— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) April 12, 2026
Microsoft later acknowledged that the app was not discovered through the review process. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
BTCUSD currently trading at $70,879. Chart: TradingView
Bitcoin losses continue to increase across the country.
Dutton’s case is one of a much larger problem. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Americans lost more than $11 billion to cryptocurrency-related scams in 2025. This is an increase from $9 billion the previous year.
The seed phrase is the master key of your self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet. Legitimate wallet applications do not require users to type anything on the screen. This is the line that Dutton unknowingly crossed. And when he did, there was nothing left to recover from.
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