A hacker who stole $20 million from a US government wallet has returned 88% of the funds while sending the rest to laundering platforms.
An unknown hacker who managed to steal $20 million worth of assets from a US government crypto wallet has returned $19.3 million to the wallet. The remaining $700,000 has not been returned and was sent to money laundering services.
Blockchain intelligence platform Arkham Intelligence reported the hacker’s returning the funds on X. “The US Government’s address has just received $19.3M back following yesterday’s reported hack, less than 24 hours after the initial address breach.” The amount represents 88% of the compromised funds. Data from Arkham shows the hacker sending back 2,412 ETH, 7,200 USDC, and 13.2 million Aave staked USDC (aUSDC).
On October 24, the cybercriminal managed to siphon away $20 million from the government. Arkham notified the crypto community about the exploit. “$20M in USDC, USDT, aUSDC and ETH has been suspiciously moved from a USG-linked address 0xc9E6E51C7dA9FF1198fdC5b3369EfeDA9b19C34c to an attacker 0x3486eE700CcaF3E2F9C5eC9730a2e916a4740A9f,” it said. “0xc9E received USG seized funds linked to the Bitfinex hackers from 9 separate USG seizure addresses, including 0xE2F699AB099e97Db1CF0b13993c31C7ee42FB2ac, an address named in the court documents relating to the Bitfinex seizure.”
Arkham also mentioned that this wallet was associated with a $20 million seizure by authorities previously due to the hacker’s role in stealing those funds from crypto exchange Bitfinex. It further added, “We believe the attacker has already begun laundering the proceeds through suspicious addresses linked to a money laundering service.” The intentions behind the hack and return of the funds remain unknown.
Crypto Scams Have Surged During 2024’s Third Quarter
This hack added to the concerning growth of criminal activity in the crypto space during this quarter of the year. Just this month, lending protocol Radiant Capital witnessed a $50 million exploit after a hacker obtained the private keys of its multisig wallets. With that, they compromised the protocol’s contracts deployed on BNB Smart Chain and Arbitrum networks. The stolen funds were shifted to Ethereum after a week to make it harder to track the fund flows.
Another attack targeted restaking protocol EigenLayer’s X account to post a fake airdrop campaign to fool users into connecting their wallets with a crypto drainer. Due to the massive following EigenLayer has on X, it can be assumed that multiple users may have fallen for the trick. Another hacker previously intercepted an email chain between EigenLayer and an investor to get the protocol’s team to send funds to a malicious wallet.
