In Tokyo, the two men who were holding the NEM stolen during the Coincheck exchange hack in January 2018 were arrested today by the police.
At the time, the exchange lost over $530 million in NEM. The crypto was then listed again on Coincheck in November of the same year, marking an increase in value of +15% during that day.
The Metropolitan Police Department arrested a doctor from Hokkaido and a CEO of a company in Osaka; both men are in their thirties. They are the first two arrested people involved in the Coincheck hack.
In reality, these two men would not have directly participated in the hacker attack against the exchange but would have bought the NEM on the Dark Web despite knowing that they were the ones that had been stolen.
There would be over 100 investigators working on the Coincheck case in order to recover the stolen cryptocurrencies. It seems that most of the NEM taken illegally during the hack have been exchanged with other crypto assets such as BTC.
Crypto hacks: other similar cases
In China during 2018, three IT experts from Hunan, Zhang and Beijing, respectively, were arrested and involved in a major scam involving 87 million dollars.
Unfortunately, over the years there have been many hacks against exchanges, starting with the well-known Mt. Gox. During 2019, almost 20 crypto exchanges were closed, some of them precisely because of hacker attacks.
Not surprisingly, the advice that everyone in the industry gives when approaching cryptocurrencies is not to leave funds on centralized exchanges or to use decentralized exchanges that do not hold users’ cryptocurrencies and are therefore less susceptible to attacks.
