Here’s an interesting turn of events; two computer programmers, brothers Eli and Assaf Gigi, have been arrested in Jerusalem in connection to one of the world’s largest and most prominent cryptocurrency hacks: the now billion-dollar 2016 Bitfinex hack.
The duo, according to Finance Magnates, were long suspected of “systematic” cryptocurrency theft and were arrested during a raid. Eli Gigi, the elder of the two, is reportedly a graduate of an elite tech unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
The brothers allegedly set up fake crypto sites, mimicking prominent crypto exchanges and wallets, and lured traders to use them.
They did this by publishing links to those sites on Telegram groups and other trading oriented forums. After the traders clicked on the links and submitted their private keys, the information was collected by the brothers, who used it to transfer the crypto coins to their own wallets.
While this is considered to be their main practice, the police take into account that the brothers might have also used other schemes to net the money.
The two had an alleged connection to the Bitfinex hack, though Israeli police has so far refused to elaborate on the matter.
Nearly 120,000 Bitcoin was stolen on Bitfinex back in 2016. The value of the stolen coin was roughly $72 million back then, but as the Cointelegraph notes, “after Bitcoin’s meteoric rise in the summer of 2019, the value of the stolen funds now amount to around $1.4 billion.”
Police managed to obtain a crypto wallet during the raid, but the amount – in the “tens of millions of dollars” – was “significantly lower” than the centimillion Israeli police were expecting.
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