Crypto Lending Platform BlockFi Attacked With Flood of Fake, Abusive Sign-Ups

Crypto lending platform BlockFi endured an unusual assault on Sunday afternoon as an attacker spammed the platform with fake sign-ups and abusive language.

According to a report by Forbes on Tuesday, BlockFi's employees were able to identify the incident shortly into the attack that involved "vulgar and racist" language being placed in the first and last name fields on the account registration page.

The accounts were registered using over 1,000 email addresses, half of which were identified as valid and belonging to real users, according to the reporting.

“I think this spam attack [was] designed to try and create negative sentiment around BlockFi by trying to get emails sent with vulgar language in them," BlockFi CEO and co-founder Zac Prince told Forbes. Possibly 500 emails did get sent before the attack was spotted, he added.

See also: Crypto Lender BlockFi Registers Bitcoin Trust With SEC

It isn't the first time BlockFi has suffered a security scare. In May of last year, an attacker got hold of users’ data by compromising an employee’s through a SIM swap attack. No funds were lost in the incident.

"Hackers have never been successful in penetrating internal company’s systems," said Prince, who compared Sunday's incident to what happened in May as "just shooting lasers at the onion."

CoinDesk attempted to contact BlockFi, but did not receive a response by press time.