According to ChainCatcher, ZachXBT posted on social media that his fans suffered a social engineering attack by someone impersonating a16z team member and lost $245,000 after accidentally downloading malware to their computer.
It is reported that the scammer claimed to be Peter Lauten's account from the a16z team and sent messages to a project team, asking about potential podcast partnerships.
The real Peter Lauten had changed his X (Twitter) Handle from "peter_lauten" to "lauten", but the a16z official website still lists his old Handle, and several posts from the a16z X account also @ his old username. The victims were unaware of this and were subsequently socially engineered by the imposter to install a fake conference app called "Vortax" on their devices, which was actually malware.
