A former safety engineer has been sentenced to a few years in jail within the U.S. for fees regarding 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 both attacks, Ahmed, a U.S. citizen, was a senior security engineer for an international technology company whose resume reflected skills in, among other things, reverse engineering smart contracts and blockchain audits, which are some of the specialized skills Ahmed used to execute the hacks,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) famous on the time.
Whereas the title of the corporate was not disclosed, he was residing in Manhattan, New York, and working for Amazon earlier than he was apprehended.
Courtroom paperwork present that Ahmed exploited a safety flaw in an unnamed cryptocurrency change’s sensible contracts to insert “fake pricing data to fraudulently generate millions of dollars’ worth of inflated fees,” which he was in a position to withdraw.
Subsequently, he initiated contact with the corporate and agreed to return many of the funds aside from $1.5 million if the change agreed to not alert regulation enforcement in regards to the flash mortgage assault.
It is value noting that CoinDesk reported in early July 2022 that an unknown attacker returned greater than $8 million value of cryptocurrency to a Solana-based crypto change known as Crema Finance, whereas maintaining $1.68 million as a “white hat” bounty.
Ahmed has additionally been accused of finishing up an assault on a second decentralized cryptocurrency change known as Nirvana Finance, siphoning $3.6 million within the course of, in the end resulting in its shutdown.
“Ahmed used an exploit he discovered in Nirvana’s smart contracts to allow him to purchase cryptocurrency from Nirvana at a lower price than the contract was designed to allow,” the DoJ mentioned.
“He then immediately resold that cryptocurrency to Nirvana at a higher price. Nirvana offered Ahmed a ‘bug bounty’ of as much as $600,000 to return the stolen funds, but Ahmed instead demanded $1.4 million, did not reach agreement with Nirvana, and kept all the stolen funds.”
The defendant then laundered the stolen funds to cowl up the path utilizing cross-chain bridges to maneuver the illicit digital property from Solana to Ethereum and exchanging the proceeds into Monero utilizing mixers like Samourai Whirlpool.
Apart from 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.
