Upbit Hack’s $50M Funds Continue Moving After Hitting Binance

Published at: May 14, 2020

Crypto funds associated with Upbit’s $50 million hack in November 2019 have continued to move. Soon after hitting the world’s biggest crypto exchange, Binance, large sums of the stolen funds continued to be transferred to a little-known crypto exchange as well as major exchanges like OKEx.

On May 14, Whale Alert — a service dedicated to tracking major crypto transactions — reported on a series of new transactions involving funds from Upbit’s 2019 hack. According to Whale Alert, a large portion of the stolen Ether (ETH) has also hit a number of unknown wallets.

Addresses of little-known exchange Byex.com receive over $100,000 worth of stolen ETH

In a series of May 14 tweets, Whale Alert reported on at least six transactions moving Upbit’s stolen ETH to Byex.com exchange. The transactions involved batches from around $15,000 to $30,000, with Whale Alert marking them as “stolen funds transferred from Upbit Hack Nov 2019 to BYEX.”

The new transactions came some time after Whale Alert first reported in a May 13 tweet:

“We were able to confirm just now that a significant portion of the #Upbit hacks are being deposited into an exchange called #BYEX.”

Whale Alert confirmed to Cointelegraph that the funds were transferred to the exchange with the domain Byex.com. “We are certain that we have the correct hotwallet for that exchange,” Whale Alert noted.

Byex.com exchange claims they didn’t receive the funds reported by Whale Alert

Byex.com exchange subsequently specified on their Telegram channel that the platform has not been able to detect the reported transactions. “I have checked on the backend and did not see such transactions in any of BYEX accounts,” Byex.com’s project manager told Cointelegraph.

The Byex rep also pointed out that the funds were apparently moved to addresses originating from another exchange, Byex.io, which is now defunct. The project manager said:

“Whale Alert traces the "old" byex.io address which led to such confusion. We did come across BYEX’s previous news when we bought the .com domain but did not pay much attention to it. We do not know any of the byex.io team. We are a new team who just started last year around September. I would like to distinguish our official name as with our domain — Byex.com.”

Over $3 million worth of stolen Ether was moved in recent days

Byex.com’s transactions came alongside a number of other transfers involving Upbit’s $50 million hack. On May 14, Whale Alert reported that over $1.3 million worth of ETH was moved to unknown wallets in a series of transactions. Previously, at least 9,000 ETH ($1.8 million) deriving from Upbit’s $50 million hack were sent to unknown wallets in three 3,000 ETH batches, Whale Alert tweeted on May 13.

Whale Alert also reported on a $55,000 batch being deposited onto major crypto exchange, OKEx, on May 14.  OKEx subsequently tweeted that the crypto exchange launched an investigation regarding the issue.

On May 13, Binance exchange froze $27,000 worth of stolen Ether on its platform immediately after Whale Alert reported on the suspicious transaction.

Tags
Blockchain
Cryptocurrency Exchange
Hackers
Binance
Okex
Transactions
South Korea
Upbit
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