Hackers trade part of stolen funds to Coincheck in Deep Web

The funds in NEM stolen from CoinChek, the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange house, are being sold at a discount on the Dark Web, a specialist said.

According to the news media The Japan News, a specialist who has been investigating the case discovered that these NEM have been sold in the Dark Web, and then be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies using various exchange houses. This expert estimates that more than 9 million dollars of funds stolen from CoinCheck have already been sold through this and other methods.

Specifically, on February 7, NEM was sold in exchange for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a Dark Web portal. Messages containing the access point to this portal and advertising the sale of NEM with a 15% discount were sent to multiple addresses from the address of the hackers that apparently were responsible for the theft to CoinCheck.

This specialist managed to locate a specific address that seems to have been used in this portal to sell these funds, which were then sent to other portfolios and from there they were sent repeatedly to a cryptocurrency exchange operator working in Russian, Chinese and other languages, and that does not ask users to grant their identity or personal information when creating an account.

The use of a large number of addresses to carry out these transactions indicates that there were probably third parties that participated and profited from this operation. For security reasons, this expert has remained anonymous, however, stated before The Japan News.

It seems that third parties that acquired NEM at a discount sell it through a provider that makes it difficult to determine their identity. After acquiring bitcoin or other currencies, they could buy and sell NEM repeatedly at a discount for profit

This same portal shows its balance of NEM, thanks to this it was found that last Saturday the address that was suspected was used by hackers sold an equivalent of more than 54 million dollars in NEM, although this expert said he could not verify completely the veracity of this amount. In fact, as of February 7, more than 200 NEM shipments have been made through this Dark Web portal, which seems to indicate an important effort to exchange the stolen funds.

These investigations occur after the hack to CoinCheck happened on January 26, where the equivalent of 530 million dollars in NEM were stolen by a group of hackers that until now remains unknown. As early as early February, Nem Foundation Vice President Jeffrey McDonald had established that, thanks to the NEM protocol, the stolen funds were marked and were being tracked, so we would expect results from these investigations soon.