Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing round $12 million in cryptocurrencies, was sentenced to 3 years in jail on Friday.
In a information launch, the U.S. Lawyer for the Southern District of New York introduced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges and stealing round $12 million in crypto, in response to prosecutors.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, attorneys representing Ahmed, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
When Ahmed was arrested final yr, authorities described him as a “senior safety engineer for a global know-how firm.” His Linkedin profile stated he beforehand labored at Amazon. However he wasn’t working there on the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson instructed fromcrypto.
Whereas the title of one among his victims was by no means launched, Ahmed allegedly hacked Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto change, in early July 2022.
Just a few weeks later, he hacked into Nirvana Finance. Ahmed stole $9 million and $3.6 million in these two hacks. Within the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds “represented roughly all the funds owned by Nirvana,” which led to Nirvana Finance’s closure, in response to a press launch.
Ahmed confessed to finishing up each cyber assaults.
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After hacking Crema, Ahmed contacted the corporate in an try to return the stolen funds, aside from a $1.5 million payment—a sort of unofficial finder’s payment—and a promise that Crema wouldn’t report the assault to authorities. Crema refused and Ahmed was finally detained.
Whereas the sort of settlement is unusual within the cybersecurity world, it has turn into normalized within the crypto world. These offers are also known as “white hatting”, though they contain hacking the goal and stealing the sufferer’s funds with out their consent, which is extra just like what a “black hat” hacker would sometimes do. Ahmed’s case reveals that whereas the crypto business has admitted that these kind of offers are typically a price of doing enterprise, legislation enforcement would not see it the identical method.
Along with the three years in jail, Ahmed was additionally sentenced to 3 years of supervised launch and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million “and a big quantity of cryptocurrency and pay over $5 million in restitution to the crypto change and Nirvana.” to the press launch of the prosecutors.
