A former safety engineer has been sentenced to a few years in jail within the U.S. for expenses referring to hacking two decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges in July 2022 and stealing over $12.3 million.
Shakeeb Ahmed, the defendant in query, pled responsible to 1 rely of laptop fraud in December 2023 following his arrest in July.
“At the time of each assaults, Ahmed, a U.S. citizen, was a senior safety engineer for a global know-how firm whose resume mirrored expertise in, amongst different issues, reverse engineering sensible contracts and blockchain audits, that are among the specialised expertise Ahmed used to execute the hacks,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) famous on the time.
While the title of the corporate was not disclosed, he was residing in Manhattan, New York, and working for Amazon earlier than he was apprehended.
Court paperwork present that Ahmed exploited a safety flaw in an unnamed cryptocurrency change’s sensible contracts to insert “faux pricing knowledge to fraudulently generate hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ price of inflated charges,” which he was capable of withdraw.
Subsequently, he initiated contact with the corporate and agreed to return a lot of the funds apart from $1.5 million if the change agreed to not alert legislation enforcement concerning the flash mortgage assault.
It’s price noting that CoinDesk reported in early July 2022 that an unknown attacker returned greater than $8 million price of cryptocurrency to a Solana-based crypto change referred to as Crema Finance, whereas conserving $1.68 million as a “white hat” bounty.
Ahmed has additionally been accused of finishing up an assault on a second decentralized cryptocurrency change referred to as Nirvana Finance, siphoning $3.6 million within the course of, finally resulting in its shutdown.
“Ahmed used an exploit he found in Nirvana’s sensible contracts to permit him to buy cryptocurrency from Nirvana at a lower cost than the contract was designed to permit,” the DoJ mentioned.
“He then instantly resold that cryptocurrency to Nirvana at a better worth. Nirvana supplied Ahmed a ‘bug bounty’ of as a lot as $600,000 to return the stolen funds, however Ahmed as an alternative demanded $1.4 million, didn’t attain settlement with Nirvana, and saved all of the stolen funds.”
The defendant then laundered the stolen funds to cowl up the path utilizing cross-chain bridges to maneuver the illicit digital belongings from Solana to Ethereum and exchanging the proceeds into Monero utilizing mixers like Samourai Whirlpool.
Besides the three-year jail time period, Ahmed has been sentenced to a few years of supervised launch and ordered to forfeit roughly $12.3 million and pay restitution amounting greater than $5 million to each the impacted crypto exchanges.