The Italian Postal Police has discovered the person behind the largest financial cyber attack in the cryptocurrency sector so far in Italy (and in the world): he is a 34-year-old Florentine, sole director of an Italian company that manages an exchange platform of cryptocurrencies, now accused of computer fraud, self-laundering and fraudulent bankruptcy, with the aggravating circumstance of having committed the facts with abuse of the quality of system operator. In January 2018, the man allowed the creation of a 120 million euro hole on the hacked IT platform BitGrail, an operation with which more than 230,000 savers around the world were scammed.
After almost three years of investigations, the investigators of the Florence Postal Police, the financial cybercrime section of the central service of the Rome Postal Police and the Finance Police of the Judicial Police section of the Florence public prosecutor's office notified him of the precautionary measure of the prohibition of to carry out business activities and to hold executive offices in companies.
It is the first time, in Italy and in Europe, that frauds to the detriment of investors carried out entirely on IT platforms and with the use of virtual currencies have been documented, reports the Agi news agency.
The case from the beginning
The investigation was launched by the authorities in February 2018, after the complaint filed by the sole administrator of the BitGrail exchange platform for the theft of a large sum in Nano (Xrb) cryptocurrency for a value of approximately 120 million euros. The heist was accomplished by exploiting a bug in the Nano protocol and making illicit transactions, all made in the previous month.
The Florentine administrator was already known to the investigators to whom he provided Bitcoin to pay the ransoms of the victims of cryptolockers. Although the man tried to sidetrack the investigators by collaborating in the investigation, security officials began to suspect him right away.
With the support of the US FBI, through wiretapping and complex computer analysis of the exchange platform's databases, the investigators brought to light the administrator's responsibilities.
The theft of cryptocurrency from BitGrail took place on several occasions, starting in June 2017, thanks to the connivance of the Florentine suspect, who knowingly did not prevent them. The man has in fact avoided implementing the security of the platform with one of the available methods disclosed by the Nano Developers Team (the US company that created the Nano cryptocurrency), thus providing hackers with a profit of about 11 million and 500 thousand NANOs, equivalent to about 12 million euros, damaging more than 230 thousand people around the world. The hackers in question have not yet been identified by law enforcement.
Furthermore, three days before the filing of the complaint in 2018, the suspect transferred to his personal account, at a company in Malta, 230 Bitcoins (BTC) (which in the reference period corresponded to about 1 million and 700 thousand euros, now are even more), attributable to the customers of the exchange platform.
During 2018, the administrator repeatedly tried to empty the account, but the owners of the investigation seized all his accounts, including the findings in cryptocurrency up to the equivalent of 120 million euros.
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