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Hackers who compromised high-profile Twitter accounts to promote a BTC scam could have stolen more if Coinbase hadn’t blacklisted their addresses.
Coinbase, along with exchanges Gemini, Kraken, and Binance, blacklisted the alleged hacker’s address, preventing its users from sending BTC – up to 30.4 BTC, worth $ 284,960.78 at press time – at the address of the hacker’s wallet. However, 14 Coinbase users were able to send BTC worth around $ 3,000 to the hacker’s address before Coinbase was able to blacklist that address.
“We noticed within a minute or so tweets from Gemini and Binance,” said Philip Martin, Coinbase’s chief information security officer. “The principle we want to pay attention to is harm reduction without reducing the underlying utility of the asset,” said Martin, “to prevent people from being stolen when it is in our power to prevent it.”
The hacker’s money is on the move
Regardless of the exchanges that made an effort to prevent the Twitter attacker from successfully defrauding their users, the hacker was able to collect a total of around 400 payments, totaling (13.1364 BTC) from individuals located around the world.
The BTC stolen by the hacker is already on the move: 2.89 BTC has already been sent from the hacker’s wallet to a Wasabi wallet. According to a report from blockchain analytics firm Whitestream, one of the hacker’s addresses “interacted with addresses related to several digital currency payment processors: CoinPayments, Coinbase and BitPay.”
A Binance spokesperson was also quoted as saying that the attacker even sent some of their stolen BTC to the Binance exchange “a small amount of BTC (equivalent to about $ 10) was sent to a Binance main wallet address.” the spokesman said “It appears he has made the move to confuse blockchain researchers.”
Where will the hacker liquidate their BTC?
The hacker will have trouble clearing the stolen funds. At this point, every digital currency exchange has the hacker’s addresses blacklisted, several blockchain analytics firms are closely monitoring the cash flows created by the attacker, and the FBI has launched an investigation into the matter..
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