Oklahoma City Police has arrested two young men who allegedly stole cryptocurrencies worth around $14 million from Crowd Machine Network, a crypto company based in California.
The local news published on Saturday that the duo was busted on September 24 at an Oklahoma City west-side hotel, after the case was reported to the California internet crimes task force on September 22.
Fletcher Robert Childers, 23, and Joseph Harris, 21, hacked into the Crowd Machine Network through a SIM swap that allowed them to claim the phone number and identity of a company’s key team member.
Afterward, they made away with the native token (CMCT) of the decentralized network. Crowd Machine reported earlier this week that its main wallet has been compromised and even revealed the address of the thief’s wallet.
This unfortunate event led to the drop of CMCT token price as numerous exchanges stopped trading it, til an investigation into the matter was completed.
As the new information has published, the suspects lodged to a hotel room at the west side of Oklahoma City and placed a “do not disturb” sign on their door for two days.
Law enforcement agencies were able to track them through a vehicle registered by Childers, one of the suspects. The authorities claim that the car was taken to the shop where one of them caught on security camera came when purchasing a cell phone and a sim card, that was later used to carry out the identity theft.
At the time of writing, the news source confirmed that Harris was still held in the Oklahoma County jail while Childers is no longer under county custody.
Judging by current market valuation, the amount of stolen tokens from the wallet is 42000 CMCT. However, the market price of the token had dropped massively quickly after the incident.
After the hack, Crowd Machine Network assured token holders that the halt of CMCT trading is only temporary. However, even though no official confirmation has stated that the token is back, according to Coinmarketcap, trading had resumed.
Over the past day, CMCT had raised nearly 30% to a price of $0.003 per token and a market cap of above $1.4 billion. Impressive, even though it still reflects a 70% drop from its price before the incident, just a week ago.
