What happened
The attacker first sent a Bankr Club Membership NFT to the wallet Grok controlled. Reports say holding it gave the agent higher permissions that bypassed standard transfer and swap limits.
The attacker then asked Grok on X to translate a Morse-code message. The decoded text was an instruction to send 3 billion DRB tokens to a specific wallet. Bankrbot accepted Grok’s output as a command and executed the transfer on the Base network, and the tokens were sold soon after.
What happened next
Reports say about 80% of the funds were later returned after the DRB community identified the attacker. The AI Incident Database record contains no statement from Bankr or xAI.
What would have stopped it
- Never let one agent’s output act as an instruction to a payment agent. Require a request authenticated by the wallet owner.
- Treat decoded or translated text as untrusted input, the same as text from a stranger.
- Do not let tokens or NFTs received by a wallet change its permissions. Permission changes need the owner’s approval.
- Cap transfers per transaction and per day, with human confirmation above the cap.
Sources
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