Hackers Brazenly Move $375,000 of Cryptopia's Stolen Ether

By CCN: Whale Alert, an account which automatically and manually notes large crypto transfers for Twitter followers, stated this morning that slightly more than $250,000 of stolen Cryptopia ether moved today.

$250k Parked, $125k Moved to EtherDelta

1,000 ether moved to 0x7d90b19c1022396b525c64ba70a293c3142979b7, an address which holds no other tokens. Roughly the same amount of ether previously left the wallet. The Cryptopia hacker seems unable to decide what to do with them.

⚠ ⚠ ⚠ 500 #ETH 126,218 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Cryptopia Hack to EtherDeltahttps://t.co/gM3VlOZ9EM

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 21, 2019

Interestingly, within the past hour at press time, one of the addresses associated with this one moved 499 ether to EtherDelta. Address 0x338fDf0D792F7708d97383EB476e9418B3C16ff1
made this transaction to the exchange which was previously fined for dealing in unregistered securities.

⚠ ⚠ ⚠ 498.99937 #ETH (124,939 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Cryptopia Hack to #Etherdelta

Tx: https://t.co/Axdj81fTEt

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) May 21, 2019

Cryptopia lost around $15 million in a major hack earlier this year. More recently they’ve gone into liquidation and warned customers not to expect all of their funds back. Reportedly, the exchange could not meet its debt obligations as a result of the hack, which saw its user interest, trust, and volume plummet. One question is why user funds would have been available to the exchange for satisfying debts, as most eloquently stated in this tweet:

This is blatant misappropriation of funds and should be handled as such. You all should face jail time. Why shortly before the audits were done you had the hack? Guess we never owned the coins on your exhange did we?

— Kai (@KNietner) May 17, 2019

The exchange initially reported a theft of less than $3 million, but Elementus, an upstart crypto analytics firm led by Max Galka, discovered that the loss was much more damaging than that.

The exchange then announced a “rebate” plan from which it has more recently backed off.

Hacked Funds Still Moving After Cryptopia Enters Liquidation

The attackers have yet to be caught, but the timing of the recent movement of funds is interesting, to say the least. Any time that an exchange is hacked, people suspect an inside job. That being the case, it’s interesting that on the very day Cryptopia’s official liquidation begins, hundreds of thousands of dollars of its stolen funds begin moving to decentralized exchanges.

Previously, a lot of the tokens had already been sold off on decentralized exchanges.

The funds noted by Whale Alert were still parked by press time. There’s no stopping the holder from continuing to trade them unless decentralized exchanges as a whole decide to “freeze” those funds, which presents its own set of problems for the crypto ethos.

The relatively small exchange’s hacking started the year off with a negative tone and was followed up by the much larger-scale hack of Binance, which has come to be considered an institution. Binance rocked the world a little more when CEO Changpeng Zhao considered the notion of paying miners to thwart his attackers. Other exchange antics such as Bitfinex’s investigation by New York State and the subsequent $1 billion launch of its LEO token continue to cast doubt on the viability of centralized exchanges in decentralized ledger technology.

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Hackers Brazenly Move $375,000 of Cryptopia’s Stolen Ether

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