Hackers moved more than $8 million USD in Bitcoins July 8th from digital wallets they’d been sitting in since the Malta-registered crypto trading platform Binance, one of the world’s largest, was hacked for more than 7000 Bitcoins in May, Hard Fork reports.
At the time of the hack, 7000 Bitcoins were worth $40 million USD, but are currently worth almost $84 million.
The latest movements of the stolen coins were first reported by the “CryptoTwitter” account “Whale Alert”:
⚠ 706.1 #BTC (8,038,240 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Binance Hack May 2019 to hack wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 8, 2019
⚠ 1 #BTC (11,384 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Binance Hack May 2019 to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 8, 2019
These are not the first funds stolen from Binance to start moving, however.
In June, hackers moved more than $21 million USD in Bitcoins into various smaller digital caches, moves Coindesk characterized as “show(ing) a concerted effort to break up the bigger wallets into smaller chunks.”
Following the hack in May, Binance CEO Changing Zhao shocked some in the crypto community, which espouses values of “decentralization” and blockchain record “immutability,” when he suggested that Bitcoin miners could conspire to “roll back” records in the Bitcoin blockchain to render the stolen coins useless.
Following the resulting outcry, Zhao quickly back-pedaled and withdrew the suggestion, claiming he was very fatigued from dealing with the hack when he made it.
Within 8 months of starting Binance in 2017, thanks to technical savvy, fortuitous timing and the crypto bull run of late 2017, Zhao was a billionaire.
According to the anonymous blogger Neuron, “More than 980,000 Bitcoins have been stolen from (cryptocurrency) exchanges,” to date.
At today’s prices (1 Bitcoin=$12 400 USD), 980 000 bitcoins are worth more than $12 billion dollars USD.
Many other types of coins have been stolen from crypto exchanges as well, and users are generally advised to store their crypto coins offline in “cold wallet” hardware devices.