In November last year, the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange, UPbit, was hacked. The perpetrators took approximately $50 million worth of Ethereum. A new report shows that $3.2 of the stolen funds is already laundered using small transactions towards numerous other exchanges.
During November in 2019, Cryptopotato reported that the popular South Korean crypto exchange, UPbit, was hacked. At the time, over $50 million worth of the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, were withdrawn from the exchange to an anonymous account, which raised concerns.
Even though UPbit officials reacted swiftly and stopped all further transactions, they confirmed a bit later that the hack indeed took place. The CEO of the company also said that they would recover all lost funds from UPbit’s corporate assets.
A new report indicates that 20,520 ETH of the total stolen amount has already been laundered. In terms of USD, it has a value of $3.2 M, which is 6.4% of all the stolen funds.
The anonymous address that received all stolen coins when the hack was initiated has been linked with numerous small transactions towards lots of other cryptocurrency exchanges. Some of those exchanges include Binance, Bitfinex, Bitrue, Huobi, Hitbtc, and more.
Uppsala Security, the entity behind Sentinel Protocol, revealed the information and claims that these transactions have the sole purpose of money-laundering. The President of the firm, Patrick Kim, seems to believe that this particular criminal activity will continue:
“We believe that the hackers continue to launder money through exchanges without any sanctions standing in their way.”
The Korean exchange appears to be taking further steps to improve its security and to make sure that similar activities won’t happen again. UPbit recently announced that it has updated its Ethereum wallet security system and made the old addresses obsolete.
The company has also opened deposits and withdrawals for Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. Moreover, customers should delete the previous ETH address from their wallets entirely, as this could cause future losses.
“A new wallet system has been adopted for deposit and withdrawal of cryptocurrencies. […] The recovery of ETH sent to the previous address from now on could be a long and costly process.”