League of Legends pro Doublelift had $200,000 stolen from him
Team Liquid Bot Laner Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng has revealed a crazy story about how someone stole $200,000 from him.
Doublelift was streaming Ranked Duos on League of Legends with Cloud9’s Goldenglue, when he decided to tell the story to his audience. He revealed that very few people knew about the incident, including members of Team Liquid who he said he had “barely” told the story to.
Doublelift explains that he recently got a notification on his phone saying he was overdrawn on his bank account. “I was like, what? This doesn’t make any sense. This is my bank account, this is where I put most of my money,” the 2018 NA LCS MVP says.
Doublelift states that he called his bank immediately to find that all the charges came from Coinbase, which is a company that deals with the buying, selling and storing of digital currencies like Bitcoin.
“I tried to log into Coinbase, couldn’t do it. Tried to reset my password, couldn’t do it. I called my bank, and told them it’s like a fraud, none of these charges are me, it was $200,000, so it’s a lot of money,” he explains.
The Bot Laner goes on to state that he emailed Coinbase to explain the situation, and began his own investigation into what happened. Doublelift believes he was targeted by ‘SIM-swapping’, where someone rings your service provider pretending to be you, claims your phone has been lost or stolen, and then gets your phone number transferred to another SIM card.
Doublelift believes that this happened to him during a short period when his phone wasn’t working – when he called T-Mobile, they stated his phone was marked as lost or stolen.
During the time his phone was down, the thief gained access to Peng’s email account using his phone number, and set it so that any email from Coinstar would be deleted immediately, thus not alerting Doublelift as to what was happening.
Doublelift has confirmed that the claim he has with his bank to get his money back is still ongoing, but he’s confident he will get his money back. Coinstar, however, won’t return any lost cryptocurrency.