VeChain's buyback wallet was compromised on December 13, 2019, at 12:27 AM GMT, resulting in theft of 1.1B VET tokens (~$6.5M). Internal misconduct was suspected, with a trojan-infected machine containing keylogging software enabling attacker access to private keys. The VeChain Foundation issued an emergency patch causing Authority Masternodes to vote and freeze the stolen funds. On December 30, the community voted to permanently destroy 727M of the frozen VET.

The VeChain Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting the VeChain public blockchain platform, announced that their repurchase address was leaked at 12:27 PM Eastern Time on Friday (ie 1:27 AM Beijing time) . The company stated in the announcement: “The security breach is most likely due to the improper behavior of a member of our finance team who created a repurchase account without fully complying with the standard procedures approved by the foundation, and due to human error. , Our audit team did not find such inappropriate behavior. We want to emphasize that the incident has nothing to do with the actual standard process or the effectiveness of VeChain’s hardware wallet solution."