Finally, the US DOJ has arrested the three people behind the post-bankruptcy hacking incident of crypto funds in the FTX crypto exchange.
FTX was a popular crypto trading platform, but it suffered a serious collapse in November 2022, when FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) misused most of FTX customers’ funds for personal benefits and expensive gifts. Shortly after filing for bankruptcy, the FTX exchange suffered a hacking attack and lost over $400 million worth of crypto assets. At the time, SBF clearly said he was not behind that incident and also claimed it could have been an inside job.
Often many people claimed that it was SBF who used backdoor codes to steal money from the stock market for his family’s future, but in reality everything was just part of speculation. Currently, SBF is in prison and is likely to undergo this sentence for more than 10 years.
On February 2, 2024, Bloomberg reported that investigators had arrested three in the case. These people are Robert Powell from Illinois, Emily Hernandez from Colorado and Carter Rohn from Indiana.
The US DOJ is charging these three people for hacking activities via the SIM swap method and stealing $400 million worth of crypto assets from the FTX exchange.
Allegedly, these three people managed to collect some private data from 50 FTX customers and also from one of the FTX employees.
On behalf of the collected data, these perpetrators convinced the SIM service provider company to transfer the SIM card.
Furthermore, these malicious actors used various authentication codes to gain access to FTX’s crypto wallets.
To date, the FBI has received 2,056 complaints about SIM swapping, with losses totaling $71.6 in the past twelve months.
Notably, such hackers not only target individual people to attack SIM swap victims, but also target government agencies. Last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) faced a similar SIM swap attack.
The attacker gained access to the SEC agency’s X account (Twitter) and falsely announced that the SEC body had approved Bitcoin spot ETF applications while the decision was pending.
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