Singer-songwriter G. Love, who is set to perform in Berkeley later this year, says he lost about $424,000 in Bitcoin after downloading a fraudulent app that appeared to be legitimate.
Garrett Dutton, the Philadelphia-born musician known for his laid-back blend of blues and hip-hop with the outfit G. Love & Special Sauce, said in posts on X over the weekend that the theft occurred after he installed what he believed was the official Ledger app, a tool used to manage cryptocurrency.
Instead, he downloaded a convincing fake one from Apple’s App Store.
After entering his “seed phrase,” a private recovery code that functions like a master key to a crypto wallet, scammers were able to access and drain his account.
The loss totaled about 5.92 Bitcoin, which Dutton said he had been saving for roughly a decade.
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT said the funds were traced through cryptocurrency exchange accounts.
“I been in the crypto circus since 2017. Today they caught me off guard. It was my own damn fault for not being more diligent,” Dutton, who performed at BottleRock Napa Valley last year, wrote in a post Saturday, April 11. “But let it serve as a warning. There’s so many scams.”
In follow-up posts, Dutton pushed back on skeptics who questioned whether the loss was real after he shared a Bitcoin address for donations. He said he had nothing to gain from fabricating the incident and pointed to blockchain tracking of the stolen funds as evidence.
The episode comes as cryptocurrency scams continue to climb. The FBI reported $11.36 billion in crypto-related losses in 2025, a 22% increase from the previous year.
Security experts say legitimate companies will not ask users to enter a seed phrase into an app, a common red flag for fraud.
Apple has not publicly addressed the incident, though reports indicate the fake app has since been removed.
G. Love & Special Sauce are continuing their tour with Jack Johnson, including two shows scheduled at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.