Usually, if something has been stolen, the perpetrator of the theft immediately runs away and doesn’t care about the victim. As a result, if high-value items are stolen, the chances of these items being returned to their owners become much slimmer.
Recently, a hacking incident that ended quite uniquely happened to Poly, a company that provides a platform to connect multiple blockchains into one.
Poly’s company admitted that it experienced a hack that resulted in cryptocurrency worth US $600 million (equivalent to ₦246.9 billion in Nigeria) being stolen by hackers who managed to break into its server network.
At the time of the occurrence, Poly had pleaded with the hackers to return the money. But not long after this hacking incident occurred, Poly server hackers came back again and wrote a letter that was quite surprising.
It is said that the hacker intended to return nearly half of the money he had stolen to Poly. It is known that US $258 million worth of crypto money has now been returned by the hackers to Poly.
$260 million (As of 11 Aug 04:18:39 PM +UTC) of assets had been returned:
Ethereum: $3.3M
BSC: $256M
Polygon: $1M
The remainings are $269M on Ethereum, $84M on Polygon
— Poly Network (@PolyNetwork2) August 11, 2021
It is not clear why the hacker intended to return the stolen money. But many say that the difficulty of cashing out the cryptocurrency is one of the reasons.
Elliptic’s Chief Scientist of Blockchain Analytics, Tom Robinson, told CNBC that laundering money using cryptocurrencies is a very difficult thing to do. Because all transactions made will be recorded transparently through the blockchain. This is not the first time crypto money has been stolen, in fact, in April 2021 a fake cryptocurrency app on iOS stole US $1.6 million from users.
