Not very interested in money: Crypto hacker who stole $600m returns $260m

The hacker who stole cryptocurrency
worth $600 million from Defi provider Poly Network’s coffers has returned
currency worth $260 million on Thursday, the BBC reported. Poly Network posted
a tweet announcing the return. 

Poly Network said
that it had been sent digital tokens of three cryptocurrencies — $3.3 million
worth of Ethereum, $256 million worth of Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and $1
million worth of Polygon.

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A total of $269
million in Ethereum tokes and $84 million in Polygon token remains to be
recovered.

In what seems like
an act of self-aggrandizement, the hacker published a three-page question-and-answer
session essentially interviewing himself, said Tom Robinson, co-founder of
Elliptic, a London-based blockchain analytics and compliance firm to BBC.

The hacker said
that he returned the stolen assets because he is “not very interested in money”.

In his notes
posted to the blockchain, the hacker said that he did not want to cause any “real
panic (in) the crypto-world”. He added that he had spent all night to find a
vulnerability in Poly Network’s system that he could exploit and upon finding it,
was worried that the network may fix the security patch without telling anyone.
So, he decided to take millions of dollars to make a point.

According to
security analysts, the nature of blockchain technology is such that it becomes
hard for cyber criminals to profit from stealing digital currencies because “everyone
can see the money being moved across the network into the hacker’s wallets”.

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Following the
heist on Thursday, Poly Network had put out a plea for the stolen Ethereum, BinanceChain and OxPolygon tokens to be shunned by
traders running “wallets” for stolen cryptocurrency.  In a message aimed at the hacker, Poly Network tweeted: “The amount of
money you hacked is the biggest one in defi history,” referring to the
decentralised finance system involving cryptocurrency.

“The money you stole are from tens of thousands of cypto community
members,” the firm said.

Interestingly, while threatening to involve the police, Poly Network had also
offered the hackers an opportunity to “work out a solution”. Poly Network had
also posted the online addresses used by the hackers and appealed to “miners of
affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens”.