A retired North Carolina couple, Brandon Laroque, 54, and his 60-year-old wife, had their entire life savings of over $3 million in XRP stolen in a hack discovered on October 15, 2025. The theft likely occurred on October 12, when the attacker executed two small test transactions of 10 XRP each around 11:15 a.m. Eastern time, followed by a full sweep of approximately 1,209,990 XRP to a new address.
Brandon had been building his XRP position since 2017 and was planning to buy a house in Las Vegas. "That was everything we had," he said in a YouTube video, adding that he doesn't expect the funds to be recovered. The stolen XRP was quickly broken apart and moved across dozens of wallets, eventually bridged to the Tron network via Bridgers (formerly SWFT) in over 120 Ripple-to-Tron conversions.
Ellipal, the wallet provider, released a statement on October 18 blaming user error, claiming Brandon entered his hardware wallet seed phrase into the Ellipal mobile app, turning what was supposed to be cold storage into a hot wallet. The company noted that color indicators in the app—blue for cold and orange for hot—may have been misunderstood, but insisted no thefts had ever occurred from its physical wallets.
Blockchain researcher ZachXBT traced the stolen funds to a Tron wallet address (TGF3hP5GeUPKaRJeWKpvF2PVVCMrfe2bYw) and then to multiple over-the-counter brokers linked to Huione, a Southeast Asian marketplace sanctioned by the U.S. for handling illicit transfers. "Once it's bridged across chains and hits OTC desks, there's almost no way back," ZachXBT warned, advising against crypto recovery scams. Brandon filed reports with the FBI and local police but faced difficulties reaching specialized cybercrime investigators.
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