According to the reports of the cyphertrace, crypto criminals had stolen $1.38 billion by the first half of 2020. But amidst that there’s a piece of positive news for the traders that finally after 2 years of legal activities an Australian woman facing charges for Ripple coins theft was sentenced for two years and 3 months.
She committed this crime with the help of an associate where they stole more than $300,000 in fiat value in the form of Ripple coins (XRP). She stole over 100,000 XRP coins in January 2018. From the reports of the Australian authorities Kathryn Ngyuen ( the criminal) hacked into a 56-year-old man’s cryptocurrency wallet-account. She then changed the two-factor authorization of mobile number into her own number and executed the crime.
Handling the stolen XRP coins
Kathryn cleverly transferred the stolen cryptocurrency into the Chinese crypto exchange where she converted her XRP coins to BTC further laundering them to various different accounts. &NewsSydeny reported that Chinese authorities were successful to recover not more than $9,000. They also released a twitter video for the same.
A Sydney woman at the centre of a murky cryptocurrency fraud is facing a whopping bill and the prospect of jail time. It has been revealed that she may have to pay back a quarter of a million dollars. https://t.co/OF81oZFF1j @ebatten7 #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/7g56DXhPkv
— 7NEWS Sydney (@7NewsSydney) July 31, 2020
She executed the clever but cunning heist at the peak of the XRP, in 2018 when ripple coins were trading close to $4. This was also the all-time high price of the coins. As per the current press time trading price for the XRP tokens is at $0.4 meaning they dived 10 times lesser in value since the crime took place.
Chris Craigie, the presiding choose for the case commented it become a “tough and troubling decision” to send Kythren to prison. He further added, “her references reflected that she was generous and hardworking individual.” This was reported by News Corp. Kathryn Ngyuen was the Australian who was sentenced for the crypto-related crimes. But she was definitely not the first person who committed them.
In fact, stealing tokens and hacking over wallets is slowly moving to a common occurrence. So common that various big exchanges and coins have been in the clutches of them. CypherTrace has said that $1.7 billion in 2018, $4.5 billion in 2019, and $1.36billion in 2020 are few major theft crimes that occurred in the industry. More shocking is that majority of these are still under investigation and holds unrecovered money to the victims.
