Crypto casino Duelbits goes offline after $7 million hot wallet hack

Crypto gambling platform Duelbits has taken its site offline after attackers drained roughly $7 million from its hot wallets on Thursday.

“Confirming a ~$7M hack. Still investigating exactly what happened and how,” co-founder Joe wrote on X, adding that “user funds are safe.” He said the platform would stay offline until the investigation is finished and its hot wallets are refilled.

Blockchain security firm Scam Sniffer first flagged the incident, reporting that Duelbits hot wallets on Ethereum, BNB Chain and Tron sent funds to newly created addresses in a suspected private key compromise. It later said the company’s bitcoin hot wallet also lost 8.1 BTC.

A private key compromise is also the method that targeted Stake, the largest crypto casino by volume, in 2023. Hackers at the time made off with $40 million.

Etherscan data shows the Ethereum wallet, labeled as a Duelbits hot wallet, sent 836 ETH, about 593,000 USDT, 97,000 USDC, 31,500 DAI and 12.4 billion SHIB to the attacker within minutes. The wallet now holds less than $25 in ether.

Most of the stolen assets have since been swapped to ether and consolidated into a single new address holding about 2,234 ETH, worth roughly $6 million. The funds had not moved onward as of publication.

Before the incident, DappRadar ranked Duelbits 17th of 43 tracked crypto casinos by on-chain deposits, with about $5.7 million across its monitored wallets. It was not immediately clear whether those figures reflect balances before or after the outflows.

Duelbits said in a statement that it is investigating a “security incident” and took the site offline as a precaution.