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The days of bank robberies are over. The former MIT students stole $25 million in the USA – from the comfort of their home office. The stolen property: The cryptocurrency Ether.
According to the US Attorney’s Office, the two brothers Anton and James Peraire-Bueno planned the robbery meticulously for months. They would then have carried it out in April 2023 – within 12 seconds. The stolen $25 million in the cryptocurrency Ether came from the Ethereum blockchain.
Almost cracked the blockchain
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the two acquired the necessary knowledge during their studies at the renowned elite university MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is not the first time that MIT has been associated with crypto crime: Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto entrepreneur who embezzled billions of dollars in customer funds on his crypto exchange FTX, also studied at MIT. In the current case, the Peraire-Bueno brothers, the presumption of innocence applies.
What is particularly explosive is that the two brothers are said to have managed to carry out their manipulation closer to the blockchain than anyone before them. It is not new that trading platforms are hacked and cryptocurrencies are stolen. Billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies are stolen every year.
Legend:
The cryptocurrency Ether is based on the Ethereum blockchain and has been in circulation since 2015.
REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
According to the US Attorney’s Office, the two brothers didn’t just hack into the system, but rather pretended to be part of the system. This is a whole new dimension of crypto fraud. Because the blockchain prides itself on being particularly secure.
Historic hacker attack from North Korea
From a financial perspective, the case is of course not all that significant. The hack of the Ronin network in March 2022 is considered the largest crypto theft. At that time, hackers who were targeting the cryptocurrency Ethereum stole $625 million. According to the American FBI, hackers from North Korea are said to be behind the attack; As a result, they stole private keys from crypto exchanges using phishing attacks and used them to divert funds.
The crypto exchange FTX was also hacked after its bankruptcy in November 2022. According to an investigation report, more than $400 million was stolen.
The Mt. Gox case was long considered the largest crypto hack; This Japanese crypto exchange is said to have stolen 850,000 Bitcoins worth over $450 million from customer accounts between 2011 and 2014.
A new dimension of yield
Against this background, the sums that are stolen in traditional robberies on banks or post offices seem downright modest.
The largest Swiss postal robbery at the Fraumünster branch in Zurich in 1997 brought in 53 million francs in loot. In the legendary raid on the Glasgow-London mail train in 1963, Ronald Biggs and his gang stole around 2.6 million British pounds. At the exchange rate at the time, that was the equivalent of 34 million francs.