Trezor Flags Suspected Spy Implant in CryptoBilis Wallet

Trezor has been pulled into the CryptoBilis mess. The company said on X that a Safe 5 sold through the Southeast Asian reseller shows signs of tampering. It is the same reseller whose Ledger wallets were drained of an estimated $72 million to $93 million earlier this month.

One correction to the way this is being retold: it is not third-party software. Trezor's own disclosure describes hardware. A customer in Indonesia opened his Safe 5 and found an extra circuit board between the main board and the screen, fitted with a cellular module and an antenna. According to his report, the board reads what the screen shows, recovery phrase included, and sends it out over a mobile network whenever the device is plugged in.

He bought the wallet in August through Tokopedia, where CryptoBilis runs a store. He reported it on October 28 through Trezor's responsible disclosure program, and he had already moved his funds off the device before he found the board. Trezor says no CryptoBilis buyer has told it about a loss.

There is a big caveat. Trezor has not seen the device yet. It judged the report credible from photos and a video interview with the reporter, and says its security team will examine the unit once it arrives. Everything below rests on that.

What Trezor Wants Buyers To Do

Anyone who bought a Trezor from CryptoBilis since March 2026 should move funds to a new wallet with a new seed, and should not reuse the old backup on another device. If there is no spare hardware wallet, Trezor suggests a software wallet or a familiar exchange as a stopgap. Devices that were never set up should stay that way. Affected buyers can get a replacement shipped directly or a voucher, and Trezor asks them to keep the CryptoBilis unit and contact support.

It also expects phishing to follow. Fake emails, letters and phone calls are likely, and Trezor repeats that nobody from support will ask for a recovery phrase.

Mark Karpelès, who has been publicly dissecting tampered wallets since the Ledger story broke, amplified the warning with "Ledger isn't the only one" and offered to cover shipping and analyze any device people are unsure about.

How The Ledger Side Played Out

Ledger started investigating on October 9 after CryptoBilis customers reported emptied wallets. A day later it confirmed that one affected device held an unauthorized implant. On October 13 its Donjon security team published how it works: the implant sits inside the enclosure and reads the screen, and when the 24-word phrase appears during setup, a microcontroller decodes it and ships it out over LTE through a provisioned eSIM. The Secure Element, the operating system and transaction signatures are untouched, which is why a tampered Ledger looks and behaves normally.

The money is harder to pin down. Bitquery counted about $93.2 million across 315 wallets on six chains, Specter put it above $86 million, and tanuki42 started at $72 million. Zetter's reporting goes as high as $100 million. Ledger has verified none of these, though it says every confirmed loss traces back to CryptoBilis. Tether froze $10 million in USDT tied to the theft, according to CoinDesk.

The damage was not limited to one reseller's customers either. MediaMarkt Saturn stopped selling Ledger devices in its German stores and online after a customer there reported an implant, and Singapore police issued an advisory on October 28 about Ledger devices bought at some local retailers. Ledger's CEO Pascal Gauthier said he is leading the investigation himself.

The "Not A Single Piece Of Evidence" Problem

Trezor's own timeline is a little awkward. By its account it dropped CryptoBilis on October 9, the day Ledger's trouble began. On October 13 it told resellers it was cutting its network, with authorizations ending January 1, 2027, and chief commercial officer Danny Sanders wrote that there was "not a single piece of evidence that Trezor devices have been compromised."

The same day, journalist Kim Zetter reported that hardware hacker Joe Grand had found implants in two Trezor wallets and had told the company back in August. One was a Model T bought through Facebook Marketplace in Canada, the other a Trezor One from a TikTok shop. Trezor answered that Sanders meant new devices from authorized resellers, and that Grand's units were fakes from unauthorized sellers, a known trick it has warned about since 2022.

Those were a different kind of attack. The tampered chips generated preloaded seed phrases the attackers already knew. The CryptoBilis report, if it holds up, is a screen-reading cellular implant of the sort seen in Ledgers, and it comes through an authorized channel, which is exactly the line Trezor said had not been crossed. Zetter had warned the unauthorized-seller cases might be a precursor.

What Nobody Knows Yet

Nobody has said who is behind it. Nobody has said where the tampering happened, whether at the reseller's warehouse, in transit or somewhere earlier. Ledger's statements do not accuse CryptoBilis of complicity and nothing public establishes it. Trezor declines to compare itself to Ledger until its lab has the board in hand, and says it is sharing information with Ledger and other investigators, with SEAL 911 advising on customer support.

I keep coming back to the basic pitch of a hardware wallet: you should not have to trust anyone between the factory and your desk. Two brands have now had that assumption poked through the same reseller, and one of them is still waiting for the box to arrive.