Ledger's crypto wallet owners have begun receiving paper letters from scammers demanding to disclose the seed phrase (a secret phrase for accessing assets) "for security purposes."

The letters are designed as official notifications from the company. The manufacturer of hardware crypto wallets has confirmed that this is a fraudulent scheme.

The fraud was reported by trader Jacob Canfield, who posted a photo of the letter with the Ledger logo on the Internet. It asked the recipient to go through a "mandatory wallet check" and scan a QR code to enter a seed phrase.

(Photo of the fraudulent email. Source: Jacob Canfield in X).

"Failure to comply with this mandatory verification process may result in access to your wallet and funds being restricted," the letter says.

In response to Canfield's message, Ledger confirmed that the emails were fraudulent. The company reminded that they never call, do not write in private messages and do not ask for a secret phrase to restore the wallet.

According to the trader's assumption, the home addresses of the wallet owners were probably obtained by fraudsters due to a data leak. In 2020, the company reported compromising the data of more than 270 thousand wallet buyers, including delivery addresses, their phone numbers and email addresses.

It was reported that after the incident, the personal information of 4,865 Russian users was also publicly available.

Ledger did not explain how the attackers obtained user addresses, and did not confirm Canfield's statement that the source of information for the scammers was a database leak.

In December 2023, the Ledger Connect Kit code library, which is used for authorization by many large cryptoservices, was hacked, and the attacker was able to debit funds from users' wallets. According to Ledger, as a result of the incident, users lost about $600,000, and the company pledged to compensate for the damage.

In January of this year, Ledger co-founder David Balad was abducted from his home in France. The attackers took him away by car and held him in another place, demanding a ransom in cryptocurrency. The day after the abduction, the police, together with the special forces, released Ballad.