Gamdom admits $3m loss in hot wallet breach

• Gamdom founder Felix Romer confirms a breach of the crypto casino’s hot wallet system.
• The loss he reports is higher than the $2.3m-plus in outflows FairGambling traced on 13 October.
• Gamdom is preparing to reopen after going offline on 13 October.

Gamdom founder Felix Romer has confirmed that the crypto casino lost just over $3m in a breach of its hot wallet system. Gamdom took its systems offline after finding the security incident.

Romer posted the figure on X on 14 October. Earlier that day, Gamdom’s own account had said user funds were safe.

This is an updated story. iGaming Republic first reported the outage on 14 October, before Romer disclosed the loss.

Disk alarm to drain

Romer said the team had completed its checks and was preparing to bring Gamdom back. He said the process would take a couple of hours.

He then put a number on the damage.

Felix Romer, founder, Gamdom, said:

“in total we lost just over $3m to the breach”

Romer said the company spotted a breach targeting its hot wallet system and moved to stop the drain. He did not say how the attackers got in, which systems they reached, or whether player data was exposed.

Gamdom’s first account was narrower. Staff were checking a suspected disk failure when they found an unauthorised connection on an automation server. The company said it took every system offline as a precaution.

That statement said user funds were safe. Romer’s update does not say whether player balances were affected by the loss he reported.

Trackers got there first

Blockchain watchers saw the outline almost a day earlier. FairGambling reported that Gamdom’s hot wallets sent more than $2.3m to new addresses between about 15:50 and 16:50 UTC on 13 October.

The payments ran across Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Tron and the XRP Ledger. Each chain’s hot wallet paid a single receiving wallet. At least four of those had never been used before. Gamdom posted that it was offline at 18:45 UTC.

The tracker put Gamdom’s hot-wallet balance at $10.5m on 12 October and about $76,000 a day later. Romer’s $3m covers less than a third of that fall.

FairGambling treats the transfers as unexplained, not as confirmed theft. Only Gamdom can say which payments it authorised and who controls the receiving wallets. It has not done so.

On Ethereum, the receiving wallet swapped its USDT and USDC into DAI within minutes. Tether and Circle can freeze their tokens in a wallet. DAI has no freeze function.

A second Ethereum wallet collected about $870,000 in DAI, much of it through the Relay bridge. In its 08:30 UTC update on 14 October, FairGambling said the two wallets held about $1.8m in DAI and 87 ether. Neither had moved funds since the evening of 13 October.

Duelbits set the bar

Less than a month ago, Duelbits went through its own hot wallet drain. Co-founder Joe confirmed a loss of about $7m on 24 September.

A day later, Joe posted three wallets holding almost $7.7m to restock the casino, so anyone could check them. The site came back on 27 September.

Gamdom has not shared wallet addresses or a timeline for withdrawals.

Stake lost about $41m from its hot wallets in September 2023 and was back online within hours. Co-founder Ed Craven said at the time that Stake kept only a small share of its reserves in hot wallets.

Regulators are dealing with breaches of their own. The Curaçao Gaming Authority is scrapping its licensing portal after attackers broke into it.

At the time of writing, iGaming Republic could not confirm that Gamdom was back online.

When it returns, the first withdrawals will tell players more than any statement. Players who sat through the outage are likely to cash out. That will test how quickly Gamdom can refill its hot wallets.

Affiliates and streamers who send traffic to the brand will want two things: a full account of how the attackers got in, and evidence that the gap is closed.