A North Carolina retiree, Brandon Laroque, experienced a devastating loss of over $3 million in XRP after mistakenly entering his hardware wallet’s seed phrase into an Ellipal mobile application. This mistake resulted in the funds being converted from cold storage to hot storage, leaving Laroque with no hope of recovery. Despite reporting the incident to both the FBI and other authorities, he encountered difficulties reaching professional investigators swiftly. The Ellipal company subsequently released a statement. After an internal review, Ellipal confirmed that the user entered their seed phrase into the application, converting it from cold storage (a secure offline method) to hot storage. This caused the funds to be accessible online. Ellipal emphasized there had been no theft by them and instead attributed the incident to a user error. While they couldn’t confirm the specifics of how the funds were stolen, they stated that entering the seed phrase nullified all security measures.** Blockchain investigator ZachXBT further investigated the situation, revealing that Laroque’s XRP was transferred to the Tron network and then distributed through multiple over-the-counter brokers associated with Huione. These transfers have left the funds scattered across numerous addresses, rendering recovery near impossible.