Bibit CEO Ben Zhou has confirmed that $280 million of the $1.4 billion stolen from the exchange has been washed and can no longer be tracked. Still, about $1.07 billion remains traceable, allowing investigators to continue their efforts to recover funds.
On March 4th, Zhou provided the latest information on the 500,000 ether (ETH) moves stolen in the February hack and ongoing efforts to stop bad actors from stealing and running away.
“Total hacked hacked funds are around US$140 million, with 77% still trackable, 20% dark and 3% frozen,” Zhou said.
By saying “Dake Dark,” Zhou showed that 20% of the stolen funds were successfully mixed, washed or sent to a platform that obscures transactions by North Korean hackers.
Partially recovered stolen assets
Investigators have helped freeze $42 million, equivalent to 3% of funds stolen so far.
sauce: Ben Zhou
Hackers converted roughly $1 billion (417,348 ETH) of stolen funds into Bitcoin (BTC), spreading it to 6,954 cryptocurrency wallets with an average retention per 1.71 BTC. This fragmentation makes further tracking and recovery more difficult.
Related: Bibit Hackers resume washing activities and move another 62,200 ETH
According to Zhou, the next week or two will be important for attackers to freeze additional funds before attempting to cash out through crypto exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) platforms and peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions.
Bibit hackers intend to maintain stolen funds
According to Zhou, Bybit Hackers mainly used distributed Exchange Thorchain to cache ETH and BTC. Other platforms such as exchanges and OKX Web3 proxy were also used to move some funds.
He also said that it could recover $65 million worth of ETH, but needed support from the OKX wallet team. Additionally, 11 bounty hunters were rewarded with a total of $2.1 million for their efforts to freeze stolen funds.
On February 25th, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic identified more than 11,000 wallets linked to Bibit hackers.
sauce: Ben Zhou
Additionally, BYBIT worked for Web3 security company Zeroshadow on February 25th for blockchain forensics. Security companies are tasked with tracking and freezing and maximizing recovery of stolen Buit funds.
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