My gate account account was hacked this morning $16k

[u/italianwopper]

Hello all, my gate account has been hacked. I woke up this morning to over $16,000 stolen from my account.

I have 3 layers of security. Two factor, email password verification which sends the code and my funds password. All three layers were bypassed. Update: gate has recently replied saying the withdrawals were all approved via the verification checks via my IP. Meanwhile, no one other than myself was near my pc, during the entire time. My pc has no malware or remote viewing software I've scanned it with different virus scanners. It's clean I don't have apps, or viewing software on it. I've always known about phishing & false sites and have been the one who always warns others about them.

I have looked through my events viewer to see if anyone has accessed my machine and all the event ID's show no access has been made. Apart from me.

I have traded for 10 years and have been obsessive over security I have never been hacked before this is the first time.

I am very aware of links, malware and phishing so I don't click about links. I don't and have not shared my password to anyone. I know very few people and no one has access to my house. I'm very private as a person.

Still all my funds on the exchange were withdrawn this morning and I went into a panic spin. Gate simply said, send us a support ticket and I need to all to my local police.

I never received one email from gate with a code to approve the transactions and my two factor is on all the time.

Unless the hacker deleted these email codes and got into my email, which I find so unlikely. I am not sure how it was all bypassed.

I have always traded manually but last night for the first time I tested a bot that gate offers with $2. (A little update here) I had looked through my gate account and I don't see this bot taking trades. It looks like I had just navigated the pages to have a look at them. I didn't actually use the bot, in my frantic thinking I thought I started the bot. But I can see I hadn't used it. It's not this.

I have an API key that I've been testing my own bot with. I have not shared the api key with anyone. The bot I made I've run once and it is only to make spot trades not withdrawals. So it cannot be that, I have not shared that with anyone. The api has restrictions on to not allow withdrawals. And was only allowed to place a spot order. Neither allowed to take any other action.

My simple earn subscriptions were all manually redeemed by the attacker and then withdrawn. To their wallet on the bsc chain. USDT had been withdrawn.

What are the recourse and steps out local police are useless. I highly doubt my machine was exploited as I only use it for my trading.

This becomes an issue where perhaps the exchange had a vulnerability exploited, but they would argue it was my device. Instead.

What are the steps from here? This is the first time it has happened to me. What do people normally do.

Thanks

Update:

It looks like the funds withdrawn were funneled to this address, seems to be the ChangeNow Hotwallet:

https://bscscan.com/address/0xa96be652a08d9905f15b7fbe2255708709becd09#tokentxns

Initially sent to this address: https://bscscan.com/tokentxns?a=0x64AEc07Fe68a63E7513446f81a5c27da4B88c7CF&p=3

Thinking over where I have gone wrong.

Some weeks ago I generated an api, with the only permission being to place a spot order. No withdraw permissions etc. I wrote my own python script to place a spot trade through the api. I never finished the script. I scrapped the idea. However I created an API key and that is the point I wanted to make. Never shared it, but I did create it. I never finished the script I wrote. So I scrapped it.

Also, for those on about cold storage. I do store my investments on cold. But my day trading funds are on the exchange I earn my income from that so I trade it daily hence it's on there.