An 18-year-old Japanese youth has been sent to prosecutors in the country's first ever trial involving cryptocurrency cyber-theft.
From Aug. 14 to Sept. 1, 2018, the youth is said to have repeatedly hacked cryptocurrency wallet Monappy by leveraging a glitch on its website, sending multiple transfer requests to himself and causing losses to about 7,700 users of the service.
He later transferred the stolen tokens to an account with a different cryptocurrency platform where he exchanged the monacoin for another cryptocurrency. The stolen funds were spent it on items such as a smartphone, according to the report.
Japanese police said the youth has confessed to the crimes, the Times writes, quoting him as saying:
Monappy’s website has been offline since the hacks, and currently reads that the “service has been suspended due to external attacks.”
In November, Monappy posted an updated on its Medium blog, saying that it had “completed the direct repair of defects” and was conducting a “final security check” before resuming its operations.
In a case involving the Mt. Gox collapse, former CEO Mark Karpeles today escaped charges of embezzlement and breach of trust, but was found guilty of manipulating exchange data by the Tokyo District Court. Karpeles was handed a suspended sentence of two and a half years.
Japanese policeman image via Shutterstock
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