Hackers Transfer Over Five Million USD Out Of One Billion Bitcoin Stolen From Bitfinex Exchange

Hackers have once again transferred BTC funds whipped from digital currency exchange Bitfinex back in 2016.

As per Whale Alert, a Twitter bot that keeps track of hefty digital currency transactions, the hackers moved around four hundred and seventy three BTC, worth approximately five and a half million USD, into an unidentified crypto wallet. At the time, the stolen funds were divided into more than a few wallets. Nonetheless, the majority of the funds are now stored in one wallet.

The CEO of blockchain forensics firm CipherBlade, Rich Sanders mentioned,

“If I had to guess, what they’re going to try to do is split funds into a bunch of wallets and try to send them to InstaSwap or [other] KYC-lite/less exchanges.”

The process described by Sanders is dubbed “chain-hopping”. In this process, the hackers transfer funds around crypto exchanges so swiftly that it becomes too resource-intensive for establishments to place subpoenas on their accounts.

Notably, hackers whipped around one hundred and twenty-one thousand Bitcoins from Bitfinex, in August 2016. At present prices, that’s around 1.4 billion USD in whipped funds, though the stolen crypto was only worth seventy-two million USD at the time.