The Biggest Crypto Heists In History

March 14, 2022 Editor Litecoin 0

As the crypto market continues to grow, the number of scams within the space have also risen. It is estimated that an equivalent of USD 4 billion has been syphoned off from innocent investors till date. What’s really astounding is the sheer scale of these scams, some of which run into hundreds of millions of dollars. To paint a clearer picture of the enormity of these scams, we’ve put together a list of the 5 biggest crypto heists in history with in-depth details on each of them.

MT Gox

The hack on Japanese exchange, MT Gox, is one of the earliest and most substantial heists in crypto history. It is also considered to be the biggest Bitcoin heist ever. The distinguishing factor of the MT Gox heist is that it wasn’t a one-time event. Instead, the hackers siphoned bitcoins in instalments from 2011 to 2014, resulting in an overall theft of nearly 850,000 bitcoins.

Experts determined that it was an underlying bug, known as transaction malleability, that facilitated the hack. Thanks to this bug, the hackers were able to steal bitcoins directly from wallets on the exchange and the loot was valued at around USD 470 million.

Poly Network

This is the biggest crypto hack in history and also one of the most recent ones. In August 2021, a hacker exploited vulnerabilities in the Poly Network, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform, syphoning off roughly USD 600 million in the process.

But it was not all doom for the DeFi platform. This is because the hacker, known as “Mr. White Hat”, did not vanish with his ill-gotten gains. Instead, in a strange turn of events, he started a dialogue with the Poly Network, which resulted in the hacker giving back most of the money, except USD 33 million in Tether (USDT) that the issuers had frozen. The Poly Network also gave the hacker USD 500,000 for returning the money and a job offer as a senior security officer.

CoinCheck

This is another Japanese scam where a hacker stole NEM or New Economy Movement (XEM) tokens worth around USD 530 million in January 2018. It is believed that the hacker exploited certain inefficiencies within the network to orchestrate the crime. And the fact that the currency was being kept in hot (online) wallets made things easier. The Identity of the hacker is still a mystery to this day.

Wormhole

This is the first and only substantial crypto heist in 2022. The Wormhole network is a DeFi platform that allows users to swap Solana directly for other cryptocurrencies. On February 2, hackers exploited vulnerabilities on the network, stealing Ether (Ethereum’s native token) worth around USD 325 million. The network was then taken down to investigate the potential bugs and the resulting hack.

KuCoin

In September 2020, KuCoin, a cryptocurrency exchange, announced that hackers had gained access to the private keys of their hot wallets. The hacker used the keys to steal large amounts of Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Litecoin (LTC), Ripple (XRP), Stellar Lumens (XLM), Tron (TRX), and Tether (USDT). The stolen tokens of various crypto amounted to approximately USD 281 million. An investigation later found that the hack was the work of Lazarus, a group of North Korean hackers.

(Edited by : Priyanka Deshpande)

First Published:  IST