Crypto crimes continue to rear their ugly head with a new incident reported in Sydney Australia where a 23-year-old young woman was apprehended for stealing $65,000 worth of crypto from a 56-year-old man. The lady as reported by the Brisbane times hacked into the man’s account via email where she bypassed the 2 step verification process by changing the password and putting her mobile number to verify it. After she successfully logged in she was able to send 10,000 XRP coins to her crypto accounts in China through the crypto accounts connected to her email account. She had the stolen XRP coins converted into Bitcoins and transferred to multiple virtual wallets.
The unsuspecting victim found himself unable to log into his account after the password changes and was only able to log in after 2 days. The victim was distraught after realizing that his account had been emptied by the hacker. “It’s a very significant crime and it’s the first we know of its type in Australia where an individual has been arrested and charged for the technology-enabled theft of cryptocurrency.” This was words of Arthur Katsogiannis, a Cybercrime squad commander who further stated that though this crime was the first of its kind in that region it would soon become a norm. according to him had the potential of encouraging crypto crime which would in turn scare crypto investors.
The 23-year-old hacker was apprehended at her parents home in Ebbing by the Public order and riot squad (PORS) before all her electronic devices were seized. After her arrest, she is set to appear before a judge at Burwood local court for her hearing on November 19th. Crypto crimes have kept law enforcement agencies busy for a while now all over the crypto crazy part of the world with Oklahoma police arresting two men for allegedly stealing 14 million worth of CMT tokens from blockchain based IT firm, Crowd machine, just last month. Also last month Japanese crypto exchange, Zaif fell victim to hackers who made away with 60 million dollars worth of crypto in an incident that was quite similar to coin checks hack which happened earlier this year.
While researching these theft cases, Japans’s national police agency (NPA) recently published a report that indicated that 158 crypto crimes had been reported in the first half of this year alone. According to the agency, 60 percent of these crimes were a result of the use of similar account password details that were quite easy to guess and figure out. XRP and Bitcoin are considered the hottest properties by hackers because they target them the most
