It can be said that "evil reaps what it sows": According to blockchain analysts, one of the biggest victims in last week's Ledger theft incident was actually a fraudster himself, who lost nearly 5 million dollars in Bitcoin.

Chainalysis reported on Thursday that a scammer stole 60 bitcoins, worth approximately $4.8 million, through a so-called "task fraud," which were later stolen by another person.

Chainalysis indicates that this address is associated with a scam: victims are asked to forge sales and reviews of genuine products, and are told that they need to invest their own money first in order to receive compensation, only for that money to be stolen afterwards.

However, the mastermind of this fraud transferred the illicit funds to the Ledger addresses, which were then attacked by different fraudsters last week.

"On September 22, the individuals behind the scam transferred the proceeds to three separate Ledger addresses," said Chainalysis. "On October 9, the thieves emptied these three addresses. A sum of money was transferred from each address into the same wallet. This wallet was reported as containing stolen funds."

headquartered in Paris, Ledger stated last week that it has launched an investigation after Southeast Asian customers reported losing their funds after purchasing from a Malaysian distributor, CryptoBilis.

Ledger From then on, it became clear that this scam was a large-scale organized criminal operation: a group of people installed implants into devices and then re-sold these devices onto the market. These implants were capable of reading users' mnemonic phrases, allowing the criminals to empty their wallets afterward.

According to Ledger, the amount of loss in one of the most "complex attacks" experienced by the digital asset industry has not yet been disclosed – but blockchain investigator Specter indicates that $86 million has already been stolen.

According to Chainalysis, this scammer who carried out the task is also one of the victims.

Ledger indicates that the company is cooperating with law enforcement authorities to 'trace funds and dismantle the attackers' infrastructure', and has ensured that no other suppliers have become targets for scammers.

CryptoBilis said that the company has stopped selling Ledger products.

This year, criminals have also targeted sellers of Bitcoin hardware wallets; in July, the popular Coldcard product suffered a large-scale attack.

Due to a firmware vulnerability in the device, the generation of mnemonic phrases was incorrect, allowing hackers to guess the investors' mnemonic phrases and subsequently steal nearly 120 million US dollars in Bitcoin from the Coldcard user.