About 2,500 stolen bitcoins (28 million US dollars) from the 2016 Bitfinex breach have been transferred from the hacker’s wallet, reported Whale Alert, an advanced blockchain tracker and analytics system reporting large and interesting transactions.
In August 2016, there was a security breach on Bitfinex, leading to 120, 000BTC to the hacker, the largest breach in cryptocurrency breach in years.
In May 2020, news.bitcoin reported that the hacker moved part of the BTC from the hacker’s wallet.
Since the breach, the hacker had been moving the bitcoin in tranches, the last time the Bitfinex hackers moved funds from the hack four years ago, they moved around $5 million worth of coins on June 24.
Founded in 2012, Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc., which is headquartered in Hong Kong and registered in the British Virgin Islands.
A few hours before the bitcoin reached all month high on Monday, July 27, the hackers moved the $28 million worth of BTC in various fractions, statistics from the BTC transaction tracker Whale-alert.io says.
Whale Alert reported that it saw a number of large BTC transfers on Monday afternoon, stemmed from the 2016 Bitfinex hack which was sent to unknown wallets.
⚠ 174.44 #BTC (1,815,092 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Bitfinex Hack 2016 to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 27, 2020
It was gathered that 85 BTC to 174 BTC, and 400 BTC were done in fractions to unknown wallets.
The Bitfinex hackers moved a grand total of just over 2,550 BTC and at the time, BTC was only trading for $10,350 a coin.
“174.44BTC (1,815,092 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Bitfinex Hack 2016 to unknown wallet”
At the time the entire stash of stolen BTC was only worth roughly $72 million, but today those coins are worth $1.3 billion at current prices.
Despite the big loss, bitfinex remains a popular exchange and it paid customers back by creating an exchange-backed token.
At the time of this report, bitcoin was trading at $11,142 at July 29, 2020, 10:24 Nigerian Time