Hackers of the Bitfinex breach moved another bunch of BTCs worth $5.7 million into an unknown wallet. Bitfinex is a Hong Kong-based Crypto exchange under the parent company iFinex.
It was August 2016, when hackers stole around 119,756 BTC worth $1 billion (as of today’s time) from Bitfinex, a popular cryptocurrency exchange. It was followed by the Bitcoin’s price falling down by 22 percent immediately after the theft, from $600 to $400. However, there was a comeback to Bitcoin a week later. The company promised its investors payback for all the losses that they had to suffer. In today’s times, Bitcoin is doing a wonderful job with an upward swing in its worth.
It is about four years now though and the hackers haven’t been identified. During this, the hackers are moving the small portions of stolen BTCs in various wallets year over year. It was June 2019, when they first moved the stolen bitcoins, followed by another in August 2019. There were ten transactions amounted to around 300 BTC worth $2.7 million and 185 BTC worth $2 million.
That means the hackers waited for at least three years for the Bitcoins’ prices to get high in the market. In 2019, BTC was back with a bang, prices near to $14,000 per coin. This is a common move that every hacker makes with the stolen assets to bring higher profits by moving the coins to different wallets when the market is hot.
According to Rich Sander, CEO of CipherBlade (a blockchain forensics firm), such moves by the hackers fall under Chain Hopping. It is a process of splitting the stolen funds into a couple of wallets and, finally, moving them all to any KYC-lite exchanges where there are fewer requirements of documents by businesses to prove their credibility for exchange. This way, it becomes hard for authorities to trace and find their breach.
If we talk about the Cryptocurrency thefts, frauds, and hacks till June 2020, there has been a rise of around $1.4 billion, said Ciphertrace, a blockchain analytics, and cryptocurrency intelligence solutions provider. The firm has also taken into consideration the events where virtual payment in bitcoin was requested on social media platforms, in the times of Covid-19. However, these remain minimal as compared to other big scams.
