Another police-related story in the cryptocurrency world arrives from London. This time, £500,000 ($667,000 USD) worth of Bitcoin (BTC) have been seized by the police. According to CNBC, the case is the first of its kind for the centennial department.
Police Seize 88 BTC from Hacker
Detectives specialized in cybercrimes were able to seize this important amount of bitcoin from Grant West, a 26 years old individual. He was sentenced to 10 years and 8 months in prison the last Friday after attacking over 100 companies worldwide.
The scammer was using pishing emails obtaining all the financial data of many individuals and companies in many different countries. With the obtained data, Mr. West sold important information to market places converting his profits into bitcoin.
Different cyber attacks have been registered to many important and recognized companies, including Sainsbury’s, Asda, the British Cardiovascular Society and the Finnish bitcoin exchange. Additionally, the officers that were investigating the case, discovered a memory card that contained over 78 million usernames and passwords.
Cryptocurrency Exchange Hacks
There have been different attacks to virtual currency exchanges all over the world. We can mention the Nano exchange BitGrail, which has been hacked losing $195 million dollars after losing 17 million Nano on February the 9th, 2018.
The exchange informed to its users about this situation as follows:
“BitGrail S.r.l informs its users that internal checks revealed unauthorized transactions which led to a 17 million Nano shortfall, an amount forming part of the wallet managed by BitGrail S.r.l. Today a charge about those fraudulent activities has been submitted to the competent authorities and now is under police investigation.”
Another important attack took place in Japan. The important Coincheck exchange lost 523 million NEM coins, which were valued around $500 million dollars. Apparently, the coins were not stored in a cold storage wallet.
