Police in Italy and France have arrested several people in connection with a $14 million attack on the Holograph cryptocurrency protocol.
In a detailed post on X on August 14, the multi-chain token platform reported that law enforcement authorities in France and Italy have made multiple arrests of individuals suspected of being behind the theft of 1 billion of its native tokens, worth €13 million (about $14.4 million).
According to the team behind Holograph (HLG), the investigation into the incident was led by the French Cybercrime Prevention Office and the Squad for the Suppression of theft, with assistance from Europol, the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate, and the Cayman Islands Police.
French Newspaper Le Parisien described A security source said the suspects were from Eastern Europe in their 30s and said they were arrested in Italy and were awaiting extradition to France. Authorities also said they had seized electronic devices and frozen funds belonging to the suspects.
The hack took place on June 13, where attackers exploited the Holograph operator contract to mint 1 billion HLG tokens using a proxy wallet.
In the wake of the incident, HLG lost over 80% of its value, falling to a low of $0.0029. Data from crypto.news shows that the token has mostly traded below $0.003 since the attack, only briefly reaching $0.049 on July 2, a date that coincided with Holograph’s release. After death Report on the attack.
At the time of writing, HLG is trading at $0.00231, up 28% in the past 24 hours. The token has gained nearly 60% over the week.
The investigation found that a “disgruntled former contractor” of the platform was responsible for the exploit. The contractor allegedly used his administrator access to insert malicious functionality into the platform’s smart contract, which he then executed on June 13.
Additionally, data from Etherscan showed that the attacker converted the stolen funds into Tether (USDT) just hours after the exploit.
Since then, the platform has implemented operational risk controls aimed at preventing such incidents from occurring in the future.