Bankr, an AI-powered crypto trading assistant, disabled transactions on Tuesday after an attacker accessed 14 user wallets and drained roughly $150,000.
Bankr Wallet Breach Details
The team paused operations to investigate the breach and pledged to reimburse affected users. Bankr lets people instruct an AI to trade, transfer, and launch tokens through plain language posts on X.
Each X handle that interacts with the bot gets an auto-generated wallet on the Base network. That mechanism has now produced its second public incident this year.
Bankr urged victims to abandon any compromised wallet immediately, since the attacker may already hold the seed phrase. Users were told to revoke approvals, generate a fresh wallet on a clean device, and scan their machines for malware.
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SlowMist Flags Social Engineering
SlowMist founder Yu Xian described the incident as a social engineering exploit aimed at the trust layer between automated agents. He pointed to interactions between Grok and Bankrbot that allowed unauthorized transaction signing.
Three attacker addresses linked to the breach now hold around $440,000 in crypto, SlowMist said.
The earlier May 4 incident drained roughly $175,000 worth of DRB (DRB) tokens from a Bankr-managed wallet tied to Grok, xAI's chatbot. An attacker had sent a Morse code message that Grok decoded and posted, tagging Bankrbot, which then executed the transfer.
2026 Crypto Hack Losses Mount
Apr. was the worst month for crypto security in recent memory, with losses topping $630 million. Drift Protocol lost $285 million on Apr. 1 in a Solana-based exploit linked to North Korean actors, and Kelp DAO was drained of $292 million on Apr. 18 through its LayerZero bridge.
Bad actors stole more than $168 million in the first quarter alone, with Verus Protocol's Ethereum bridge hit on Monday. The Bankr breach extends that streak into mid-May and shifts attention to a new attack surface, agentic systems with on-chain authority.
The pattern over recent months has been consistent. Drift fell to pre-signed durable nonce transactions after months of social engineering, Kelp's bridge collapsed because of a single-verifier setup, and Bankr is now grappling with prompt injection in its AI layer. Each case targeted operational trust rather than smart contract code.
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