US Government $20M Theft

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$20M in assets including USDT, USDC, aUSDC and ETH have been transferred from a US Government controlled address (0xc9E) to an unlabelled address (0x348), after their withdrawal from lending platform, Aave. The attacker has since converted majority of the stablecoins for ETH to prevent Circle and Tether from freezing the stolen proceeds. The ETH tokens were subsequently transferred across a handful of addresses including six Binance deposit addresses and one unlabelled address (0x1bA), which could be cryptocurrency mixing service, which are commonly utilized for money laundering purposes. The attacker’s address still holds $13.26M in aUSDC, an Aave-based interest-bearing token.

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The funds held by the US Government address originate from the infamous 2016 Bitfinex hack, in which 119.76K BTC, worth $72M at the time, were siphoned from the centralized exchange, Bitfinex. The accused perpetrators, Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather R. Morgan, were arrested in February 2022 for the crime, leading to the seizure of the funds and are due for sentencing in November.