Nearly one year after millions of IOTA tokens mysteriously went missing from user wallets, a new Reuters report confirms that the funds have been retrieved. The theft was allegedly carried out by an unnamed U.K resident that was apprehended last week through the effort of European Police agencies.
Following his capture, IOTA co-founder and board co-chairman Dominik Scheiner said in the report that the missing funds are now in the custody of the European authorities. They will likely be used as evidence against the culprit, who IOTA had first thought to be a group.
Schiener said,
“From what we know, just a small amount of the 10 million euros has not been found. The exchanges have blocked the hacker’s accounts. He tried to free the money, but he did not succeed.”
How $11 Million IOTA Tokens Went Missing
According to a Europol report, the alleged culprit who IOTA’s co-founder described as “well educated,” created an iota seed generator.
IOTA token holder needs an 81-digit seed (pin) to serve as their wallets private key and often used online seed generator sites for this purpose. Therefore, unsuspecting users created their IOTA seeds on the culprit’s now-defunct website, iotaseed.io.
The culprit then collected the user’s newly generated seeds, used it to gain access to their IOTA wallets and moved their funds to his own wallet.
Police investigations into the case were started in early 2018 which ended in the arrest of the culprit in the city of Oxford, U.K earlier this week.
Meanwhile, the crypto community is facing another tough hack case involving Cryptopia, a New-Zealand based crypto exchange. As we reported yesterday, hackers have made away with over $16 million and still have access to ether wallets on the crypto exchange.
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