In 2021, a hack from Uranium Finance caused a shock wave on the cryptom market. Cybercriminals found a weak point in a smart contract on the Defi platform. Their prey was $ 50 million Cryptocurrencies. A good four years later, American authorities tracked down part of Uranium Finance’s stolen assets.
Authorities find stolen crypto
Combating cybercrime is high on the agenda of American Federal Ranking and investigative authorities. A collaboration between Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego and the public prosecutor’s office from New York (SDNY) bears fruit. Recently confiscated them $ 31 million on stolen cryptocurrencies. Most likely there is a connection with the Uranium Finance Hack in April 2021.
Sdny announced the find of the lost crypto at the beginning of this week about “X”:
Sdny and @Hsisandiego Seize Cryptocurrency Worth Approximately $ 31 million Related to April 2021 Hack of Uranium Finance. If you Believe you have bees a Victim of this hack, please contact (Email Protected).
– us attorney sdny (@sdnynews) February 24, 2025
The fact that the lost crypto now reappears is partly thanks to the blockchain researcher ZachxBT. This “crypto detective” always draws attention to itself. So he played an important role in the detection of the perpetrators of the Bybit hack. On his “X” account with over 820,000 followers, he referred to an investigation from 2023:
In December 2023 I published an investigation into the $ 50 million Uranium Exploit on BSC. In it I explained how the perpetrator had washed $ 10.5 million on Magic: The Gathering Exchange Cards with the help of a broker and shared my Tornado Cash-Demix for 11.2k ETH of the attack. “
How did the Uranium finance hackers go up?
Hackers use all sorts of methods to steal crypto. One of them is the abuse of weaknesses in software, which happened at Uranium Finance 2021. By error in one of the SmArt contracts On the stock exchange, the criminals increased the balance of the platform in an artificial way.
The cyber attackers captured various cryptoma coins with a total value of $ 50 million. Large amounts of Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Polkadot (Dot), Cardano (ADA), Uranium U92 (U92) disappeared from the Uranium Finance platform. In addition, $ 36.8 million of Binance Coin (BNB) and the StableCoin Binance USD (BUSD) were stolen.
For years, the hackers managed to hide their prey. After the theft, they wash the stolen crypto over the coin mixer Tornado Cash. From the examination of ZachxBT, to which he refers to his tweet, showed that the criminals 11,200 ETH postponed over various addresses. They exchanged part of the money in Wrapped Ethereum (Weth) and then back to ETH. After the money laundering, they sent the money to centralized stock exchanges.
The procedure described above made it impossible for authorities to pursue the cash flows. Since the infamous hack there has been no activity on the website and on the social media of Uranium Finance. The victims have therefore never seen their crypto again. This may change through this find.
In 2023, almost 700 million of crypto were found and many injured people got their money back, which is hopeful.