Hackers behind cryptocurrency heist return S$352 million

The purported hacker said returning the money "was always the plan".

Faris Alfiq | August 12, 2021, 12:59 PM

Hackers behind one of the biggest cryptocurrency heist returned US$260 million (S$352 million) in digital coins, more than a third of what they stole.

The company at the centre of the heist, Poly Network, a decentralised finance platform that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions, took to Twitter on Aug. 10 and said that US$353 million (S$479 million) was still outstanding.

On Tuesday, Poly Network announced that they had been hacked and urged the culprits to return the stolen funds, threatening legal actions.

In total, US$613 million of digital coins were stolen.

A blockchain forensics company, Chainanalysis, said that the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the digital contracts that Poly Network uses to move assets between different blockchains.

Purported hacker did it "for fun"

According to digital messages shared by Chainanalysis and another crypto tracking company, Elliptic, a person who claimed to have perpetrated the hack said that they did it "for fun" and wanted to "expose the vulnerability" before others could exploit it, according to BBC.

The purported hacker also said that it was "always the plan" to return the digital coins and that the hacker was "not very interested in money."

Thus far, the identity of the hacker, or hackers, involved has yet to be identified and Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the messages.

The latest heist comes as losses from theft, hack and fraud related to decentralised finance is at an all-time high, according to crypto intelligence company CipherTrace.

From January to June, CipherTrace said that there was US$474 million in criminal losses registered by the decentralised finance sector.

Top image via Clint Patterson/Unsplash