Ex-Cryptopia Employee Pleads Guilty Of Stealing $170K Worth Of Crypto

Ex-Cryptopia employee pleads guilty of stealing $170K worth of crypto as we can see more in our latest crypto news today.

Ex-Cryptopia employee admitted to stealing nearly $170,000 and pleaded guilty on two charges, theft by a person in a special relationship and theft of more than $NZ1000. the former employee of the now-defunct exchange confessed to stealing about $170,000 worth of digital assets and according to the hearing at the Christchurch District Court on Monday before Judge Gerar Lynch, the man-made an unauthorized copy of private keys from the exchange’s wallets and saved it on a USB drive.

He took the USB drive at home and uploaded the data to his personal computer. It’s worth noting that the possession of private keys to the wallets of the trading venue provided him with access to thousands of digital wallets alongside $100M of other crypto coins. The first signs of the crime happened in 2020 when a former customer of the exchange said he deposited bitcoins into an old wallet on the exchange by mistake and asked the funds to be returned. The accounting form Grant Thronton put the trading platform under review and established that 13 BTC were illegally withdrawn following series of operations but back then, this amount of crypto equaled $165,000.

The former staffer of the exchange contacted David Ruscoe and Tom Aspin from grant Thronton and confessed that he stole the coins but he also admitted to swiping $7000 worth of other digital assets. The ex-employee returned some of the funds and offered to pay for the rest however he was convicted and will be put on bail until sentencing. The crypto exchange Cryptopia admitted that it was a victim of a hack and its team was able to protect the venue to some extent. The exchange refused to reveal the actual amount stolen but the attackers inflicted huge damage.

A considerable amount of 19,391 ETH was transferred from Cryptopia to an unknown wallet that could indicate the size of the missing funds or a part of them. Cryptopia went into liquidation after $24 million worth of crypto were stolen after another hack which represented 15% of the exchange’s virtual asset holdings and was seen as the biggest attack in New Zealand history.

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/altcoin-news/ex-cryptopia-employee-pleads-guilty-of-stealing-170k-worth-of-crypto/