The primary suspect in a huge Bitcoin fraud uncovered in the Indian state of Karnataka has made some alarming disclosures to investigators. Srikrishna Ramesh aka Sriki said in his confession that he was the first to breach the Hong Kong-based Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange and that it was his first large Bitcoin exchange attack. He detailed how he broke into the major cryptocurrency trading system twice.
“My first major bitcoin exchange hack occurred at Bitfinex; the exchange was hacked twice, and I was the first to do it. The second case included a basic spear-phishing assault that resulted in two Israeli army hackers gaining access to one of the workers’ PCs, which provided them access to the AWS cloud account.”
Additionally, the primary accused detailed how he obtained access to the Bitfinex platform, stating, “I took advantage of a data centre issue to get access to the server through KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine). I restarted the system into GRUB mode, changed the root password, logged in, reset the withdrawal server credentials, and routed the funds to my bitcoin address through bitcoin.”
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Sriki was arrested in connection with a huge Bitcoin controversy involving hacking the government procurement site and defrauding the government of crores of rupees using data he obtained from the government portal. Additionally, he claimed to have a lengthy history of hacking many cryptocurrency exchanges and online poker networks. Among the websites he hacked is cryptocurrency platform Bitclub Network, from which he allegedly took 100 Bitcoin, and BTC-e.com, from which he allegedly stole over $3 million.
Sriki also spoke of a fantastic lifestyle, claiming to have earned over 20,000 Bitcoin but squandered it all on a luxurious lifestyle. He clarified,
“I didn’t save anything. Blew it up on the luxurious lifestyle which I continued by spending around Rs 1 to Rs 3 lakh a day on alcohol and hotel bills on average. The price of bitcoin during the time of this hack was around $100 or $200, which I shared with my friend Andy from the UK.”
He ran out of luck at the end of 2020, when many of his accomplices were caught on unrelated charges, leading to his arrest and opening the Pandora box.
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