The cryptocurrency hacker who stole almost $114 million from Poloniex, one of the oldest exchanges, can return the money in exchange for a generous reward. Additionally, they cannot transfer or launder the loot, Justin Sun said in an on-chain statement.
Poloniex hacker’s identity confirmed, says Justin Sun
The Poloniex exchange team has already confirmed the personal identity of the bad guy behind the November 10 hack. Police forces from China, the United States and Russia have been involved, Justin Sun said today, November 18, in a message attached to a transaction sent to the attacker’s address.
The statement written in Chinese, English, Russian and Korean was transferred as an input data message (IDM) written by the address 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132 labeled as one of Justin Sun’s Ethereum (ETH) wallets.
The attacker has seven days to return the stolen funds. If they return the nine-digit sum, a $10 million bug bounty will be offered:
Return by November 25, 2023 and we will offer you a $10 million white hat reward. If they do not return by then, police forces in various countries will take action.
Furthermore, Sun stated that the stolen funds had been flagged for tracking and cannot be used as all financial counterparties will be frozen. If true, any attempt to launder money is pointless.
As U.Today previously reported, hackers emptied the exchange’s wallets of 3.1 million XRP, 32 million US Dollar Tethers (USDT), around 284 Ethers (ETH), and 86.5 Wrapped Bitcoins (WBTC). , along with 35 different TRC-20 tokens.
Immediately after the hack, Justin Sun offered the attacker a 5% reward, or almost $5.7 million. However, no one responded to the first proposal.
Biggest cryptocurrency hack of 2023?
On November 15, the Poloniex team declared that all actions necessary to restore the exchange’s operational functionality had almost been completed.
The team is currently busy strengthening security through a top-level audit, which is also nearing completion. Once the audit is completed, the exchange will be able to return to its normal trading routine.
It is worth noting that so far, the Poloniex hack is the second largest cryptocurrency attack in 2023. An attacker from Euler Finance managed to steal more than $190 million on March 13.
At the same time, the Euler attacker recovered all the funds in question in less than a month. As such, the Poloniex hack is the largest cryptocurrency “black hat” attack recorded in the last 12 months.
