More than two years after large amounts of NANO cryptocurrency were stolen from an Italian-based crypto exchange BitGrail, local authorities have accused its founder, Francesco Firano, of being responsible for the theft.
Ivano Gabrielli, Director of the National Center for Cybercrime (CNAIPIC), told Reuters in a report Monday that Firano is somehow connected to the hack that resulted in 230,000 investors losing more than $146 million worth of NANO coins.
“It is not yet clear whether he participated actively in the theft or if he simply decided not to increase security measures after discovering it,” Gabrielli told Reuters.
Currently, Firano faces a series of charges, including money laundering, computer fraud, and fraudulent bankruptcy.
Authorities revealed that the incident is the biggest cyber heist that has ever taken place in Italy.
BitGrail’s NANO Saga
Trouble first started for the embattled crypto exchange in July 2017, when 2.5 million NANO tokens were stolen from its platform. Despite the massive hack, the exchange made little to no effort to fix the security breach, thus resulting in the loss of another 7.5 million NANO tokens to hackers three months later.
Many tech-savvy workers weighed in on the issue at the time, accusing BitGrail of not fixing some significant known vulnerabilities like storing users’ funds in hot wallets instead of cold wallets.
In a bid to appear innocent before the public, Firano halted operations on the exchange and moved funds from the central wallet to a cold wallet before reporting the incident to the police.
However, according to a lawsuit filed against BitGrail last year, Firano had within the period deposited 230 bitcoins (BTC) on another cryptocurrency exchange between February 2 and February 5, 2018.
The exchange, which planned on reimbursing the stolen funds to investors, retracted the move, saying it had insufficient funds to repay 100% of the funds.
NANO on BitGrail have been stolen.
Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now).
The devs, as you have guessed, dont want to collaborate
— Francesco The Bomber (@bomberfrancy) February 9, 2018
This sudden U-turn led to a series of class actions against NANO cryptocurrency founders and BitGrail for fraud, theft, and violating federal security laws.
Last year, BitGrail was sentenced to return as much of its assets to its customers as possible. The court ruling instructed that both BitGrail and Firano be declared bankrupt, while his assets were ordered to be seized.
The Medium blog post stated that Italian authorities had successfully confiscated over $1 million in Firano’s assets, including his car.
