Stefan “stefan11222” Burakov said that his ex-girlfriend used his wallet seed phrase that he left on an iPad to steal $3m in crypto. [Image: Shutterstock.com]

Online high stakes poker player Stefan “stefan11222” Burakov has accused his ex-girlfriend of stealing $3m in cryptocurrency from him two years ago. In a thread on Russian poker forum GypsyTeam, the famed cash game crusher blamed himself, admitting that he gave her an iPad that had a photo of his crypto wallet’s seed phrase still on it.

I was tempted to give the go-ahead to my Italian friends from Bangkok”

In an odd bit of “you really didn’t have to say that,” Burakov wrote (translated from Russian): “I was tempted to give the go-ahead to my Italian friends from Bangkok so that they would return my money to me by their methods for only 10% of the reward.”

Burakov said that he ultimately decided to “not step on this path” and that he was actually thankful for the theft, as it “turned me into a monster and I learned to control this monster.”

A seed phrase is a sequence of random words generated by a person’s wallet software that is required to gain access to a crypto wallet.

Burakov’s ex, Alena Mironenko, responded the next day, saying neither she nor Maxim Shatilov, the other person Burakov accused, had anything to do with the $3m. She said that more than one person had access to multiple devices that had an image of the seed phrase and that she even warned him about it.

He has since posted twice in the message forum thread, one post of which implied there will be to come on the topic: “Let’s assume that the preflop has been played, there are 3 streets of trading left before the showdown…”