Wallet Freeze Maintained At KuCoin As Hackers Start Laundering Stolen Crypto

The KuCoin weekend hackers continue to move millions of stolen crypto tokens around as KuCoin keeps the accounts of its clients on lockdown.

Moving And Laundering

Whale Alert, the transaction tracing twitter account, flagged a staggering 18.4 million XRP (Worth $4.5 million” has flowed into a hack wallet. This occurred this Tuesday morning, Eastern time. Alongside this, 10,000,000 AGI, worth $550,234, moved to an unknown wallet from the KuCoin Hack. Further hack-related transactions are for 1,002,849 ELF ($101,451) and 4,105,295 CVC ($111,477).

Less than an hour after the hackers routed the XRP, 17 million of that crypto was shunted to another sub-wallet in less than an hour. Four batches, about three million XRP apiece, were then shunted into more sub wallets, with the process doubtlessly going on further.

Some Bumps In The Plan

Even with all the XRP, it is only a drop of the stolen crypto the hackers managed to run off with, now estimated to be worth $281 million in crypto. A large portion of these stolen funds consists of Tron, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar tokens. Elliptic, a crypto trading firm, had estimated all of this funding stolen over the weekend.

Tokens based on Ethereum stand as the lion’s share of the haul, making off with $150 million in ERC-20 tokens, such as Chainlink, Tether, and more.

However, in a small saving grace, the hackers are having trouble to dump these tokens, especially with the closely-guarded centralized exchanges. These exchanges can quickly flag, often blocking, wallets that had illegal funding moved to.

Laundering Going Slowly; KuCoin Still In Lockdown

Even so, by Monday, Elliptic had estimated that the hackers had managed to flip millions in stolen tokens, laundering it for $7.5 million in Ethereum (ETH). They did this through decentralized exchanges (DEXs), such as Uniswap and Kyber Network.

Elliptic had made a blog post about the matter at large on Monday, and explained that it was eyeing that ETH. Furthermore, they suspected that the laundering process will still continue on various DEXs.

KuCoin, in the meantime, has staunchly maintained its withdrawal and deposit freeze since Tuesday, and has been forced to cancel previously-scheduled programming, as a result. A prime example of this would be a trading competition that got booted due to all of this.

With any luck, all of this can be resolved in due time. KuCoin will take a hit for this, no doubt about that, but hopefully, it can recover in such a way that it doesn’t lose too much of its clientele.