US authorities have indicted two Russian-born pirates. The latter would have stolen $ 17 million in various cryptocurrencies thanks to an ingenious system.
The US Treasury Department has sanctioned Danil Potekhin and Dmitirii Karasavidi , two Russian hackers
A sophisticated scam allegedly allowed them to steal $ 17 million from several users of the Binance , Poloniex and Gemini platforms .
The funds were stolen in bitcoin and ether. First of all, the two accomplices created fraudulent sites , similar to those of the above-mentioned exchange platforms. Thanks to this good old technique of phishing , or phishing in good French, they were able to access the usernames and passwords of deceived users.
According to the US authorities, they stole:
$ 10 million from 142 victims on Binance;
$ 5.24 million to 158 Poloniex users;
And $ 1.17 million to 42 Gemini customers.
A beautiful booty that the hackers then tried to launder on the platforms in question, by creating many intermediary accounts
The victims were not all large whales. One of them declared having thought of suicide following this theft. Another claims the funds were used to pay for medical treatment for her three-year-old daughter. It is perhaps a technique to coax the United States Secret Service – which would have recovered a good part of the funds. Regardless, having your cryptocurrency stolen is always very painful.
They also reportedly engaged in various market manipulation tactics . On Poloniex, hackers would have artificially inflated the price of the GAS token using the spoofing technique . By placing fake buy orders to drive up the price, they then converted the GAS into ethers and transferred the funds to Bitfinex.
The multiple accounts used to confuse the issue were not enough. They must now report to the Department of Justice , and face 59 years in prison.
