The digital wallets of the United States government were the objects of theft, with an estimated $20 million in cryptocurrencies seized.
Arkham Intelligence traced the stolen funds to an address, 0xc9E, that received assets from the 2016 Bitfinex Hack from nine U.S. government-seized wallet addresses. The address 0xE2F699AB099e97Db1CF0b13993c31C7ee42FB2ac, which was previously implicated in court cases related to the Bitfinex cryptocurrency theft, is one of the wallets that was compromised.
The misappropriated tokens consist of $5.4 million in USDC stablecoin, $13.7 million in AUSDC stablecoin, $1.1 million in USDT stablecoin, and $500k in ETH. The suspect’s motivations for the transfer are currently unknown; however, the pattern of the transfers suggests that this was not an internal transfer of funds, but rather a malicious operation.
The criminal initiated the process of transferring the stolen funds to a variety of non-custodial wallets following the theft. These are the platforms that do not require users to maintain their funds with another entity, which makes it easier for wrongdoers to evade. Arkham Intelligence has determined that the hacker is most likely using email accounts linked to other reputable money laundering firms to launder the funds.
ZachXBT, a prominent crypto analyst, endorsed Arkham Intelligence’s findings, asserting that the United States government would not employ services like Switchain or N.Exchange for official transactions.
The assets in question are associated with the most high-profile breach of 2016, which occurred at Bitfinex, a cryptocurrency exchange. The U.S. authorities apprehended Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, the couple responsible for the laundering of the stolen funds, and they subsequently submitted a guilty plea to money laundering charges in August 2023. The Department of Justice confiscated $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency at the time of their arrest.
At the time of this writing, the wallet contains a meme coin that is associated with the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the remaining balance is $127. If confirmed, this would represent the most recent occurrence in the tangled tale of Bitfinex. It would be necessary for the U.S. Marshals Service, which is responsible for the management of seized property, to provide an explanation regarding the potential loss of cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency breaches have been on the rise, with a reported 900% increase in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in the previous year. The losses were roughly $1.4 billion in the second quarter of the year.
Nevertheless, the Bitfinex breach remains one of the most significant intrusions in the history of cryptocurrency robberies, despite the fact that it is occurring at an accelerating rate.
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