Recent Blockchain Investigator Report on Poloniex Hacker Transactions
The notorious Poloniex hacker continues to make moves to conceal the origin of stolen funds, as reported by popular blockchain investigator PeckShieldAlert. On April 30, an address associated with the hacker transferred 501 BTC, valued at approximately $32 million, to three new wallet addresses.
The largest Bitcoin transaction involved the transfer of 486.62 BTC, worth $30.8 million, to a single address, with two smaller amounts of 10 BTC and 5 BTC also moved to new addresses. This incident stems from a hot-wallet hack on the Poloniex exchange on November 10, resulting in a loss of over $33 million.
PeckShieldAlert initially reported the hack and identified the stolen assets, including ETH and LINK coins worth millions of dollars. Lookonchain analysts later revealed that the hacker attempted to launder the funds by exchanging them for ETH and TRX.
Despite efforts by Poloniex to recover the stolen funds, the hacker’s recent BTC transfer raises concerns about their intentions to hide their transaction trails and potentially liquidate the funds in the future. In related news, a recent report by blockchain security firm Immunefi highlighted that the cryptocurrency industry lost over $200 million to hacks and rug pull incidents in the first two months of 2024, with a total of $336.3 million lost in the first quarter due to hacking and fraud incidents.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms were particularly targeted in these incidents, given their substantial value locked in Web3 protocols. The report identified 46 hacking incidents and 15 cases of fraudulent activities, with two major projects, Orbit Bridge and Munchables, suffering significant losses. Despite the decline in losses compared to the previous year, the cryptocurrency industry remains vulnerable to malicious actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the system.
