US Law Enforcement Makes Progress on Stolen Bitfinex Funds, Partially Recover from 2016 Hack

The beauty of the cryptocurrency industry is the use of blockchain technology, allowing users to track everywhere that their tokens go.

Unlike traditional finance, the use of the immutable ledger is helpful in finding funds when they go missing. Though not every effort is so lucky, the US law enforcement managed to recover and return over $104,000 that was stolen from Bitfinex, according to a recent Medium blog from Bitfinex.

Based on the current value of Bitcoin, this would be about 27.7 Bitcoins. The theft originally occurred in August 2016 in a hack that ultimately stole 120,000 BTC total, so it is clear that there is much more left to recover. When the funds were given back to Bitfinex, they credited customers with BFX tokens, providing one BFX to every $1 lost for the users that were affected.

Anyone that chose to convert to stocks was provided with Recovery Right Tokens (RRTs), destroying the corresponding BFX tokens. The post noted,

“Within eight months of the security breach, all BFX token holders had their tokens redeemed at 100 cents on the dollar or exchanged their tokens for, directly or indirectly, shares of the capital stock of iFinex Inc. All BFX tokens were destroyed within this process.”

Right now, since there have been some stolen coins received, the platform is working to convert them into US dollars, making it possible to pay out in RTT. The announcement also says that the company was alerted by the US government that they had gotten access to the funds from the November hack last year.

Bitfinex has remained exceedingly grateful to law enforcement. CFO Giancarlo Devasini of Bitfinex said,

“Over two years following the hack of the Bitfinex platform, today we see the results of a clear and robust response strategy and the efforts of the U.S. government. It gives us great pleasure to be able to reimburse our traders that were loyal to us and believed in us at a very difficult time.”

Since 2019 began, the crypto industry has already gone through a major hack of an exchange called Cryptopia. The platform was attacked by cybercriminals, who managed to convert $3.2 million worth of tokens that they stole in their theft.

In November last year, Japanese exchange Coincheck was reopened, following a hack worth over $520 million in January 2018. Now, the company is back to offering NEM (XEM) crypto token trading, following a revival of their platform with heightened security.

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