Japan, young man arrested for theft of 134 thousand dollars of cryptocurrencies. New criminal case in the Japanese cryptocurrency sector.
An XNUMX-year-old Japanese man was allegedly arrested by the police theft of 15 million yen (about $ 134.300) of cryptocurrency.
According to the Japan Times, the accused stole this large amount of funds by hacking a website related to the cryptographic ecosystem: as mentioned in the report on the hypothesis of crime, the alleged young offender is resident in Utsunomiya, in the prefecture of Tochigi. However, his name has not been revealed because he is still considered a minor under Japanese law.
Monappy
The alleged theft of over $ 130.000 in cryptocurrency would have occurred between August 14 and September 1, 2018, police officials revealed. The accused allegedly stole the funds by hacking a website called Monappy, which traders use to manage the cryptocurrency Monacoin.
As further detailed by the Japanese authorities, the hacker used Tor peer-to-peer (P2P) encryption software to hide personal data, including his IP address. Despite the effort to cover his tracks, researchers who work for the local police department have managed to locate the offender.
Further, according to local authorities, the accused admitted to having been involved in financial crime, and would have stated thus: “I felt as if I had found a trick that nobody knows and I did it as if I was playing a video game ".
Though it is not clear how the attacker managed to steal the fundsPolice officials said they managed to exploit a website code vulnerability that governs the sending of funds to users. The hacker said he found a security gap where the website's transaction system isn't working properly if someone tries to repeatedly transfer the cryptocurrency for a short period of time.
And so, the young man would repeatedly send cryptocurrency transfer requests to his account, favoring a system malfunction. This, he said, has allowed him to transfer a large amount of cryptocurrency to his address. About 7.700 crypto investors using the Monappy website have been affected due to this security breach.
