Bitmain Will Sue The Hacker Who Stole 617 BTC

Bitmain filed a lawsuit against an unknown hacker who stole bitcoins owned by the company, clearing the Bitmain account on Binance. In the document, the company reveals a fraudulent scheme, which the attacker used to launder the stolen cryptocurrency. Lawyers argue that in the future the identity of the” unknown hacker ” will be easily established.

Last week, November 7, the Chinese mining company Bitmain filed a lawsuit in the district court of the Western district of Washington against an unknown hacker who in April this year hacked one of the accounts of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance on the Bitmain server and stole bitcoins from there.

Bitmain suggests that in an attempt to hide his identity, the hacker did not directly withdraw the stolen bitcoins to his own wallet, but used them to artificially inflate the price of low-capitalization cryptocurrency MANA, the ERC-20 token of the Decentraland virtual reality platform.

On this thought, Bitmain was prompted by the fact that at the same time in April, the price of MANA on Binance unexpectedly soared from 0.12 to 0.34 us dollars in less than an hour. At the same time, the global price of MANA then rose to 0.20 US dollars — a 40% increase. This means that hacking the account of Bitmain alone raised the nominal level of capitalization in the MANA cryptocurrency market by more than $ 80 million. In the future, the scammer could sell the previously stored MANA at a higher price.

The lawsuit claims that as part of the implementation of this scheme, the fraudster sent to Binance 2.3 million MANA from the account in Bittrex crypto-exchange. After exchanging MANA for bitcoins, the funds from the Binance account were transferred back to Bittrex.

Bitmain claims that as a result of fraud, the company lost approximately 617 BTC ($5.5 million at the time of hacking).