Last updated on August 26th, 2022 at 04:02 pm
An Australian Court has jailed a woman hacker for stealing 100,000 units of the ripple (XRP) worth $300,000.
Information Age, a local media in Australia reported that Kathryn Nguyen, 25, was sentenced to a maximum of two years and three months in jail.
She reportedly hacked into the crypto account of a 56-year old man in January 2018, stealing 100,000 units of XRP worth $300,000.
The 25-year-old Sydney woman who worked with an accomplice proceeded to change the two-factor authentication code to her own mobile phone number.
After tampering with the security firewall of the wallet of the owner, Nguyen transferred the victim’s XRP holdings – worth around $300,000 at the time – onto a Chinese exchange where she converted the funds to bitcoin (BTC) and later moved the coins into several wallets.
How Kathryn Nguyen was arrested
Kathryn Nguyen was arrested in 2018 with her computer, mobile phones and money and officially charged and pleaded guilty in August 2019. Only $9,000 was recovered from her by Chinese authorities.
Australian Police were on the investigation after the victim reported it. It took the police almost a year before an arrest was made.
Australia has a very low “cyber-related crime” police said.
With the arrest of Nguyen, she becomes the first person to be charged and jailed for cryptocurrency theft in Australia.
At the time of the hack, one XRP token traded for $2.84, but XRP has crashed to $0.29 at the time of this report, according to coinmarketcap crypto price index.
In passing sentence, Judge Chris Craigie described the crime as “out of character” for Nguyen and that her “moral judgment was distorted” at the time.
“A common thread was the offender’s willingness to help others. This takes on a different meaning in her willingly participating and assisting in a criminal enterprise,” Craigie stated.
Cryptocurrency theft report in 2020
According to crypto intelligence firm, Ciphertrace, loss from cryptocurrency hacks, theft, and fraud amounted to more than $1.4 billion between January to May 2020 alone.
The firm says that the number is likely to rise to $4.5 billion before the end of 2020.
Recall that a similar hack was executed by a 17-year-old boy Graham Clark hacked into the Twitter accounts of prominent people around the World to defraud their followers several bitcoin worth millions of US dollars.