The mastermind of India's biggest crypto heist has almost fully washed the tokens stolen from the platform.
The mastermind of India's biggest crypto heist has almost fully washed the tokens stolen from the platform. The July hack resulted in WazirX, once considered one of India's leading cryptocurrency exchanges, losing more than $230 million in funds.
According to on-chain data, the wallet of the hacker, which held the pilfered funds from the start, now has a mere $6 million in Ethereum. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham previously traced these funds and noticed that the stolen tokens have been transferred around new wallets and then transferred through Tornado Cash, one of the notorious privacy services.
This laundering operation has increased manifold in the last couple of months. In August alone, close to $50 million in tokens were transferred into Tornado Cash. However, this illegal activity increased considerably in September. The latest occurred on early Wednesday, transferring 3,792 ETH worth roughly $10 million.
Tornado Cash lets users swap cryptocurrencies across blockchains and anonymizes wallet addresses in question. The Tornado Cash saga took a sharp turn in May when a Dutch court found one of its developers, Alexey Pertsev, guilty of money laundering and gave him a prison sentence of over five years.
The hack that really set this chain of events in top gear was back in July, where one of the multisig wallets of WazirX got breached. The attack is reportedly said to siphon off more than $100 million in SHIB tokens and $52 million in Ethereum among other assets. That staggering loss was more than 45% of the total reserves the exchange reported back in June 2024.
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