The $330M Bitcoin Heist That Pumped Monero to 50%+
Have you ever gotten scammed before? Well at least it wasn’t for $330M. At the end of April, Blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted about a suspicious transaction shifting 3,520 BTC, making it in the top 10 biggest crypto heists of all time.
Have you ever gotten scammed before? Well at least it wasn’t for $330M. At the end of April, Blockchain investigator ZachXBT posted about a suspicious transaction shifting 3,520 BTC, making it in the top 10 biggest crypto heists of all time.
ZachXBT reported the victim was an elderly US citizen who was apparently socially engineered, and CoinTelegraph reported that the 3K of the funds had been sitting on their account in 2017. They suspect the cybercriminal was a Somalian who was operating a scam call center out of the UK.
According to on-chain analysis the cybercriminals laundered the funds in record time:
- Send the BTC to instant exchanges and mixers
- Converted the BTC into Monero using atomic swaps and other exchanges – there was so much BTC being sold for XMR that it made the price of Monero jump 50% almost $400
- Send the BTC through pre-registered centralized exchanges and over the counter trading desks
By the time I got around to covering this story, ZachXBT had edited his tweet to remove the Bitcoin address. So I had to look it up myself.
I’m quite new to Blockchain forensics but what I found isn’t matching up with the offical account oif things. For one, it does look like there was some activity in the account holding the victim’s Bitcoin. The last transaction that funded the victims account for 3K Bitcoin was in March.
Its unclear if this was part of the normal operations for the Bitcoin platform they were using, but the Bitcoin was definitely being moved around. You can trace a majority of the victim’s Bitcoin back to 2017 – although it was moved around and consolidated from different wallets.
Is this the activity of a custodial exchange, or is there something else going on here?
One thing is for sure – you shouldn’t just go off of what a random BTC investigator says on the internet.
I covered BTC/XMR Atomic swaps on the first episode of the #TBOT show, at that time – the price of Monero had gone up 50% – almost to $400.00 – a lot of was attributed to this heist that put half of the Bitcoin to a buying Monero frenzy.
So Monero helped cybercriminals once again – its a testament to its power, but I’d really love to see it be used for honest dealings. Maybe we’ll see that in the future.
Recommendations:
- Don’t hold your BTC on an exchange, as you can see – it didn’t help this poor soul and the exchange was consolidating their BTC in different transactions
- Keep some Monero for untraceable transactions
- If you need a non-custodial wallet, check out the open-source StackWallet. It handles BTC, XMR and other coins – and its the wallet I recommend. https://stackwallet.com
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