Curious case of the $600M crypto heist

Paris, Aug 12: Cryptocurrency investors have been transfixed over the past few days by the antics of a mysterious hacker who stole more than $600 million — before giving some of it back.

But is the thief a good samaritan who stole the money to expose a dangerous security flaw, or did they simply realise they were about to be caught?

The hacker struck Poly Network, a company that handles cryptocurrency transfers, on Tuesday in one of the biggest thefts of digital monies in history.

By Thursday they had returned some $342 million — still far short of the total, but enough to raise furious speculation over their motives.

In messages embedded in the transactions, the thief insisted they stole with good intentions.

“I am not very interested in money!” they wrote, adding it was “always the plan” to return the stolen funds.

Despite their volatility and concerns over the huge waste of electricity they generate, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have soared in popularity in recent years.

Their combined market value currently stands at nearly $2 trillion, creating alluring prospects for hackers.

Most notoriously, thieves stole 8,50,000 Bitcoins from Japanese exchange Mt. Gox in 2014. Worth around $470 million at the time, the coins would today be worth a staggering $38 billion.

Another Japanese exchange, Coincheck, was hacked for nearly $500 million in 2018.

But in both cases, the technology that cryptocurrency uses allowed some of the funds to be traced — even though for Mt. Gox, it came too late to save the company. Cryptocurrencies use blockchains, digital ledgers that record every transaction made.

Pawel Aleksander, an expert in tracking stolen cryptocurrency, said thieves typically try to cover their tracks by splitting the money up and moving it around — “sometimes using hundreds of thousands of consecutive transactions”.

But his company Coinfirm is among a growing number that specialise in following dizzyingly complicated blockchain transactions, helping law enforcement agencies and investors to trace stolen assets.

While some crypto-aficionados are hailing the Poly hacker as a hero, others suspect they began handing the money back because sleuths were on their trail. —