A certain hacker pulled off one of the greatest crypto-heist on Tuesday. The hackers reportedly stole $613 million in digital coins from Poly Network. Hacker sent a message to Poly Network embedded in a cryptocurrency transaction saying they were “ready to return” the stolen money.
The DeFi platform responded requesting the money be sent to three crypto addresses. The hacker, strangely, returned about $260 million in less than 24 hours.
The network announced on Twitter that the hackers have returned $3.3M Ethereum,$256M BSC and $1M Polygon.
Earlier in a Twitter thread, the network said that the hackers have returned $4,772,297.675.
The hacker/s had Transferred Back $4M
- $2,654,946.051 to the ETH address
- $1,107,870.815 to the BSC address
- $1,009,480.809 to the Polygon address
The network also confirmed that they received $1M USDC using a transaction on ethereum and wrote “You are moving things to the right direction. We received 1+M USDC on Polygon. Did you ask us to encrypt the receiving addresses with your BookKeeper public key?”
Although SlowMist said on its website that it has identified the attacker’s mailbox, internet protocol address, and device fingerprints, They are yet to name the hacker/s.
The hacker is posing as a “white hat” and said that they only hacked the network to identify its vulnerability. The hacker said that he always intended to return the money. But certain crypto experts are skeptical about hackers’ intention.
Gurvais Grigg, chief technology officer at Chainalysis, said it was unlikely that white hat hackers would steal such a large sum. He said they had probably returned some of the funds because converting them into cash had proved too difficult. “It’s hard to know the motivation … Let’s see if they return the whole amount,” he added.
“I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal cryptoassets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics,” said Tom Robinson, chief scientist of blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, “Even if you can steal crypto assets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the broad use of blockchain analytics by financial institutions.”
