Nearly $500 million in NEM stolen from CoinCheck may have been completely “laundered”

In January, CoinCheck was hacked and nearly $500 million in XEM was lost, but now all the stolen cryptocurrency may have been successfully laundered by hackers.

In fact, since March this year, the hackers who attacked CoinCheck have been laundering money on the cryptocurrency trading platform on the dark web. As the largest cryptocurrency hacking incident in history, the hackers immediately set up an anonymous cryptocurrency trading platform on the dark web after the crime, and then exchanged the stolen XEM coins for other cryptocurrencies through the platform. It is reported that the cryptocurrency trading platform only accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin payments, and also offers buyers a 15% discount.

In addition, all transactions on the trading platform are automated, thus attracting many buyers to exchange premium cash.

It is reported that the dark web trading platform was launched two weeks after the CoinCheck attack, and it also provides buyers with adequate customer service functions. If buyers encounter any technical difficulties in purchasing the stolen new currency, they can get their support. All questions will be answered within 48-72 hours, but it is worth mentioning that all answers are not completed in English, so it is obvious that the hackers are not from English-speaking countries.

After the CoinCheck theft, the Singapore non-profit NEM Foundation began tracking the stolen NEM coins and tried to mark all addresses associated with the stolen NEM coins. However, the hackers seemed to be one step ahead of them and chose to accept payments in Bitcoin and Litecoin, making it impossible for the NEM Foundation to track most of the transactions.

The NEM Foundation’s tracking system takes about 2-3 minutes to mark a NEM address, and this delay gives hackers enough time to take measures to avoid tracking. Previously, some people called on the NEM Foundation to use a hard fork to solve the problem, but the foundation believed that the incident was caused by a security error of the CoinCheck exchange, not their problem, and therefore refused to do so.