Hacker Returns Half of $611 Million Stolen Cryptocurrency Haul 

The hacker behind the biggest heist in cryptocurrency historical past has reportedly returned virtually half of the $611m stolen.

Poly Community, a platform that facilitates cryptocurrency transactions together with bitcoin, introduced earlier this week that it had been hacked, leading to a multi-million greenback loss.

“We name on miners of affected blockchain and crypto exchanges to blacklist tokens coming from the above addresses,” the community tweeted on Tuesday, offering three addresses that it stated the property had been transferred to. “We’ll take authorized actions and we urge the hackers to return the property,” it added.

The community addressed the hacker in an open letter over Twitter the next day, writing: “Expensive hacker … We need to set up communication with you and urge you to return the hacked property. The amount of cash you hacked is the largest in defi [decentralized finance] historical past. Legislation enforcement in any nation will regard this as a serious financial crime and you can be pursued. It is vitally unwise so that you can do any additional transactions. You must speak to us to work out an answer.”

The hacker then reportedly posted messages embedded in ethereum transactions despatched from the account below their management pledging to return funds and claiming to be “not very occupied with cash.”

“I AM _NOT_VERY INTERESTED IN MONEY,” the hacker allegedly wrote in screenshots from a three-page-long Q&A session shared by Tom Robinson, co-founder of crypto monitoring agency Elliptic. “I KNOW IT HURTS WHEN PEOPLE ARE ATTACKED, BUT SHOULDN’T THEY LEARN SOMETHING FROM THOSE HACKS?”

The hacker, who’s believed to have exploited a vulnerability within the digital contracts Poly Community makes use of to maneuver property between totally different blockchains, added they did it “for enjoyable” and needed to “expose the vulnerability” in Poly Community software program earlier than others may.

Poly Community swaps tokens throughout totally different blockchains, together with Ethereum and Ontology, in addition to the blockchain for bitcoin.

On Wednesday, Poly Community introduced that $260 million of the stolen funds had been returned however that $353 million was nonetheless excellent. On Thursday, the community posted an replace, saying it had to this point acquired $342m again.

“$342 million (As of 12 Aug 08:18:29 AM +UTC) of property had been returned,” Poly Community stated in a tweet earlier right this moment. Of the returned property, $4.6m are believed to be in ethereum, $252m in BSC and $85m in polygon. The remaining $268m on ethereum have but to be returned, in accordance with the platform.

Within the embedded messages shared from the hacker’s account, the individual claimed to have spent all evening on the lookout for a vulnerability to use and determined to take tens of millions of {dollars} in cryptocurrency tokens to make some extent.

“Both they simply supposed to commit theft and steal the property, or they have been appearing like a white hat hacker to reveal a bug, to assist Poly Community make themselves extra sturdy and safe,” Robinson advised the BBC. “I wonder if this hacker stole the funds, realized how a lot publicity and a spotlight they have been getting, realized wherever they moved the funds they might be watched, and determined to present it again,” he added.

The Elliptic co-founder advised Reuters that the choice to return the cash might be because of the issue of laundering stolen crypto on such a big scale.

“Even in case you can steal cryptoassets, laundering them and cashing out is extraordinarily troublesome, because of the transparency of the blockchain and the broad use of blockchain analytics by monetary establishments,” Robinson stated.

The hacker or hackers have to this point not been recognized.

Newsweek has contacted Poly Community for remark.