Top Bitcoin Exchanges Come Together In An Effort To Retrieve BitHumb’s Stolen Crypto Funds

Top Crypto Exchanges Come Together In An Effort To Retrieve BitHumb’s Stolen Funds

As many of our regular readers may recall, late last month, leading South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb fell victim to a hacking scandal which saw the company lose a little over USD $18 million worth of assets. However, as soon as this story started to gain traction across the globe, many people began to question the veracity of the emerging details.

Additionally, even though Bithumb representatives have time and again tried to claim that “the hijacked assets belonged to the company and not its clients”, many customers are still not able to access their funds (due to certain restrictions being placed by Bithum’s exec brass on all native altcoin deposits/withdrawals).

Details Related To The Case

On the 29th of March, Bithumb’s PR team released a message online claiming that the firm was witnessing an “abnormal number of withdrawals” via its monitoring system. As a result of this, the firm proceeded to manually move all of its remaining funds into a cold wallet.

In light of these “peculiar conditions”, a representative for Bithumb was quick to issue the following statement:

“We are working with major exchanges and foundations and expect to recover the loss of the cryptocurrency equivalent. Also we promise that we will open our progress clearly with social responsibility as a global leader company.”

Additionally, it should also be pointed out that up until now, Bithumb has “never” revealed how many tokens they actually ended up losing. However, as per the investigative efforts of many independent researchers, here is a small breakdown of the assets that were stolen:

• Over 3 million EOS (about $12.5 million)
• 20 million XRP (approx. $6.2 million)

More Information Continues To Emerge

Over the course of the past few weeks, Bithumb officials have maintained that its client assets have remained completely untouched by the hack — so much so that a spokesperson for the exchange even published the findings of a recent “professional external audit” performed on the company’s record books so as to allay customer fears.

“We have stated that we will conduct fair and objective due diligence on all assets that we have through a reliable external Audit,” the statement reads, linking to the accounting firm’s statistics. We are pleased to inform you that our members' valuable assets are managed and maintained in a systematic/safe manner through the attached due diligence report.”

The Crypto Community Comes Together

In an unprecedented move by the global altcoin community, a number of premier exchanges such as EXMO, Huobi, Changelly, Binance, etc have all come together to find out who the perpetrator behind this attack really is.

For example, experts from various exchange platforms have released the following numbers indicating where the stolen EOS tokens really went:

• Exmo — 662,000 EOS
• Huobi — 263,000 EOS
• Changelly — 192,000 EOS
• ChangeNOW — 140,000 EOS
• KuCoin — 96,000 EOS

Inside Job?

As mentioned earlier, many experts have argued that the recent Bithumb breach could have been the work of certain insiders who knew their way around the company’s security protocols.

For example, certain local media reports claim that South Korea’s National Police Agency has “seized an external server from Bithumb’s office as part of their ongoing investigations”. Officials claim that the server might have been used by the hackers to facilitate the theft.

Final Take

In closing out this piece, it should be pointed out that earlier this month, a local news agency called ‘The Korea Times’ published a report claiming that Bithumb had incurred an overall loss of 205 billion won ($180 million) over the course of 2018. Not only that, but the newspaper also revealed how the South Korean exchange was able to grow at a rate of over 17%, despite the company bearing massive losses over the course of the past 16 months.