$71M WBTC Dusting Attack Victim Recovers Stolen Loot

The cryptocurrency whale that lost $71 million worth of Bitcoin (WBTC) via a dust attack has recovered the stolen funds after negotiations with the hacker.

according to tweet By blockchain security company PeckShield, the scammer began returning the funds on May 9 and completed the process on May 11.

$71 million stolen from WBTC

Whale's problems started on May 3 after they mistakenly sent 1,155 WBTC to a wrong address that had been placed in the transaction history via address poisoning.

An address poisoning or dusting attack is a scam in which a malicious actor sends a transaction of zero or negligible value to the victim's wallet to show the address in their transaction history. These malicious addresses usually contain beginning and ending characters identical to those in the victim's real wallets, making them undetectable on the surface.

like CryptoPotato Both malicious and real addresses have been reported to contain characters starting with 0xd9A1 and ending with 853a91 in this case. Thus, the victim was tricked when he wanted to transfer his WBTC to a different wallet.

The fraudster did not move the stolen assets until five days later, when they began dividing the stash into smaller parts. They used more than 400 wallets to distribute funds to about 150 addresses. Notably, they exchanged the loot for around 23,000 Ethereum (ETH) on May 3.

Recovery

Details of the negotiations between the scammer and the victim are not available as the discussion appears to have taken place on Telegram.

Victim first It arrived to the scammer on May 5, offering 10% for the stolen funds. in cooperation With blockchain cybersecurity firm Match Systems and cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex, the victim threatened to track the funds if the attacker failed to respond by May 6.

After a few days of silence, the scammer sent some ETH to the victim along with a message Request is in progress Their Telegram handle for appropriate discussions. After the talks, the attacker returned the stolen items in batches. It is still unknown why the malicious actor returned the assets in full, ignoring the 10% reward offer.

Meanwhile, the value of returned assets is around $66.8 million as the price of Ether fell more than Bitcoin in the past week. Data from CoinMarketCap shows that ETH fell by more than 6.4% while BTC fell by approximately 2.8% during the same time frame.