Tech entrepreneur Austen Allred was among the victims. His wallet, tied to a project called Kelly Claude AI assistant, was drained of Ether — though the hacker left his memecoin holdings untouched. Allred said there was no sign anyone else had logged into his Bankr account, suggesting the attacker got to the private keys through other means.
How The Attack Unfolded
Bankr is a crypto trading tool that lets users send plain-language instructions — like “swap this token” or “transfer funds” — to an AI that carries out the trades.
The platform also creates a crypto wallet automatically for every X account that interacts with its bot.
That feature had already drawn attention earlier this year, when someone reportedly tricked Grok into telling Bankr to launch a token, then pulled funds from it into a wallet they controlled.
Tuesday’s incident appears to follow a similar pattern. Yu Xian, founder of blockchain security firm SlowMist, said the breach was likely a social engineering scheme aimed at the AI agent.
According to Xian, the attacker exploited the trust connection between Grok and Bankrbot to push through unauthorized transaction approvals.
He identified three wallet addresses linked to the attacker that together held $440,000 in crypto.
Xian also pointed to prompt injection as part of the method — a technique where malicious instructions are fed to an AI to manipulate its behavior.
update: we’ve identified an attacker was able to access 14 bankr wallets.
we’ve temporarily locked things down while we work through the details. we will be reimbursing any and all lost funds.
will provide more updates as we have them. https://t.co/gVMLexiglT
— Bankr (@bankrbot) May 19, 2026
Bankr Pledges Full Reimbursement
Bankr confirmed the breach in a post on X, saying it had identified an attacker who accessed 14 wallets. The platform said it shut down all transaction activity — swaps, transfers, and token deployments — while the investigation continues. It also pledged to cover all losses.
Users were warned not to sign any transactions for now. For those with wallets already hit, Bankr told them to stop using the affected accounts entirely, set up a new wallet with a fresh seed phrase on a clean device, and transfer any remaining tokens or NFTs out immediately.
If assets can’t be moved, revoking existing approvals was advised. Bankr also flagged the possibility of malware, urging users to check their computers and phones for suspicious software or browser extensions.
What Users Lost
Some users reported losing as much as $150,000 from a single wallet. The exact total across all 14 breached wallets has not been confirmed.
The attack adds to a rough stretch for the crypto space. Bad actors stole more than $168 million in the first quarter of the year.
April brought two of the biggest hits so far — a $280 million exploit of Drift Protocol and a $292 million breach of Kelp.
Just a day before the Bankr incident, the Ethereum bridge of Verus Protocol was also reportedly hit.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView
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