Tech entrepreneur Austen Allred was among the victims. His wallet, tied to a project called Kelly Claude AI assistant, was drained of Ether — though the hacker left his memecoin holdings untouched. Allred said there was no sign anyone else had logged into his Bankr account, suggesting the attacker got to the private keys through other means.
How The Attack UnfoldedThe platform also creates a crypto wallet automatically for every X account that interacts with its bot.
That feature had already drawn attention earlier this year, when someone reportedly tricked Grok into telling Bankr to launch a token, then pulled funds from it into a wallet they controlled.
According to Xian, the attacker exploited the trust connection between Grok and Bankrbot to push through unauthorized transaction approvals.
He identified three wallet addresses linked to the attacker that together held $440,000 in crypto.
Xian also pointed to prompt injection as part of the method — a technique where malicious instructions are fed to an AI to manipulate its behavior.
update: we’ve identified an attacker was able to access 14 bankr wallets.
we’ve temporarily locked things down while we work through the details. we will be reimbursing any and all lost funds.
Bankr Pledges Full ReimbursementUsers were warned not to sign any transactions for now. For those with wallets already hit, Bankr told them to stop using the affected accounts entirely, set up a new wallet with a fresh seed phrase on a clean device, and transfer any remaining tokens or NFTs out immediately.
If assets can’t be moved, revoking existing approvals was advised. Bankr also flagged the possibility of malware, urging users to check their computers and phones for suspicious software or browser extensions.
What Users LostSome users reported losing as much as $150,000 from a single wallet. The exact total across all 14 breached wallets has not been confirmed.
The attack adds to a rough stretch for the crypto space. Bad actors stole more than $168 million in the first quarter of the year.
April brought two of the biggest hits so far — a $280 million exploit of Drift Protocol and a $292 million breach of Kelp.
Just a day before the Bankr incident, the Ethereum bridge of Verus Protocol was also reportedly hit.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
