en.cryptonomist.ch
Yesterday, several Bitcoins (BTC) of those stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in the attack almost 4 years ago were moved.
The attack was a theft of 120,000 Bitcoins (BTC).
As reported by Whale Alert there are 4 transactions made.
⚠ 183.55 #BTC (1,909,875 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Bitfinex Hack 2016 to unknown wallet
Tx: https://t.co/JfeLVTAoEA
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 27, 2020
In detail, the transactions are as follows:
- 174.44 BTC and 86.26 BTC from this address;
- 183.55 BTC and 87.67 BTC from another address.
We are talking about a total of more than 530 BTC, which at the current price is equivalent to more than 5 million dollars, a really remarkable figure if we think that in the far 2016 the price of the asset was around 600 dollars.
This shows how criminals have and continue to hold-up these funds after all these years.
This is not the first time that these funds stolen from Bitfinex are moved: last May 30 BTC were moved just when the price of Bitcoin was going up, which is also happening these days.
Not only Bitfinex: how to recover stolen Bitcoin
Unfortunately, there are still many BTCs in the hands of criminals, although many efforts have been made to find them, even with the help of the American government.
The tools used to recover funds stolen from the exchanges or in any case to trace them are really many, as we saw in the workshop dedicated to fight terrorism, and also artificial intelligence can be put in place to monitor cryptocurrency patterns and movements in order to help investigators find those responsible for illegal activities.
Let’s not forget that one of the properties of a public blockchain is the ability to track any transaction to and from a particular address. Having this information, exchanges can block access to their platforms so that criminals, for example, cannot liquidate stolen cryptocurrencies to get away with it.
Unfortunately, however, address blacklisting is often not enough because criminals use different channels to liquidate the cryptocurrency or use mixing systems to obfuscate the source of the funds.
However, it will now be up to the various platforms to register new addresses and blacklist them.