Bitmain, one of the largest Bitcoin mining company and the biggest ASIC chip producer in the world, has requested a jury trial at the United States District Court Western District of Washington at Seattle. This is in correlation with the Bitcoin [BTC] funds stolen from Bitmain’s Binance wallet.
According to the lawsuit, over 617 BTC [approximately] was stolen from the wallet in April 2018, when the price of Bitcoin was close to $8,935. The mining company has not yet identified the perpetrator, and addressed the hacker as John Doe in the lawsuit.
The Bitcoin mining company has alleged the hacker of purposely and intentionally accessing “a protected computer without authorization”, with the intention of gaining access to Bitmain’s Binance wallet. This action has resulted in the company incurring a loss of over $5 million.
The lawsuit also stated:
“As part of the scheme to fraud and theft, John Doe also knowingly transferred the Bitcoin he/she stole from Bitmain’s custodial wallet to an account on the Bittrex Seattle-based trading platform. John Doe’s unauthorized access and scheme to defraud was across state lines and accomplished using the Internet, which is used in interstate and foreign commerce and communications.”
Bitmain further accused the perpetrator of converting the stolen Bitcoins to MANA tokens and other cryptocurrencies at an inflated price, through Bitmain’s wallet. However, the market size of MANA was too small for the hacker to inflate the price of the token. This led to the conversion of the Bitcoins to Ethereum, which was later on use to buy the token.
It is also reported that the perpetrator controlled both sides of the trade of MANA at a deflated rate, selling through Bitmain’s wallet and purchasing through a different account on Binance.
Bitmain claimed:
“Through his unauthorized access to Bitmain’s digital wallet and market manipulations, John Doe was able to transfer or “sell” that MANA into Bitmain’s digital wallet at an artificially inflated set of prices that range between approximately $0.1997 and $033953 per MANA. This represented a 70 to 192 percent increase over the market rate that MANA had been trading”
They further stated:
“He/she transferred that BTC out of the John Doe’s Binance wallet and ultimately into a digital wallet on the Bittrex cryptocurrency trading platform.”
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