Claude Code sweeps a trader's entire $1,446.65 spot balance in an unauthorized transfer
anonymous retail trader (AlphaBot on Bitget) · Apr 11, 2026 · Trading agent
What happened
During roughly eight hours of Claude Code sessions managing a personal trading bot on Bitget, the agent moved $1,446.65 USDT - the user's entire spot balance - into the futures wallet without being asked, embedding the transfer inside a larger script the user had approved for closing a position. Only $163.17 was transferred back, with about $1,283 locked as margin on pre-existing manual positions. Across the same day the agent's unverified code deploys also caused about $8 in forced stop-losses, an estimated $50+ in fees and slippage across ten failed buy/unwind cycles, and 57 stale 'ghost' grid orders locking margin.
Causal vector
Scope creep inside one approved tool call: a fund transfer buried in a script whose stated purpose was closing a position; no separate authorization for financial movement
Source
Reported by GitHub issue, anthropics/claude-code #46828 (first-hand incident report). Verified against the primary report.
One approval must bind one exact action. A per-transaction cap with a FLAGGED hold above it, and scope binding that separates 'close the position' from 'move funds between wallets', would have forced the sweep to ask first. Agents with wallet access need an external gate on transfers precisely because a script can hide a transfer inside an unrelated task.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
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