The authorities might have gained access to the funds linked to the Cryptsy theft, according to eagle-eyed on-chain analysts
According to whale alerta Twitter bot that tracks large transactions, a total of 11,325 dormant Bitcoins have been activated after 7.7 years.
The whole sum has been broken up into smaller fractions and distributed to 689 different addresses.
Whale Alert indicates that the massive amount of reactivated Bitcoin could be linked to the theft of Cryptsy.
In 2016, the now-defunct exchange announced that it had become insolvent due to a hack that allegedly occurred in July 2014. Prior to that, Cryptsy customers started facing withdrawal delays en masse.
Cryptsy CEO and founder Paul Vernon was later hit with a class action lawsuit by disgruntled customers, who accused the Boynton Beach businessman of getting away with millions of dollars worth of crypto. In September 2017, a federal judge in Florida ruled that Crypsty had indeed lost 11,325 Bitcoins, but the court failed to identify the thief.
Vernon allegedly liquidated Cryptys’s accounts in 2015 and splurged his ill-gotten funds on a luxurious mansion, a diamond ring, and an expensive car.
Last January, Vernon was charged with wire fraud, money laundering and tax evasion by the US Department of Justice. He allegedly stole over a million dollars from the purse wallet and then transferred the money to his own bank account. After moving to China in 2016, Vernon himself hacked into the exchange, stole its database of client funds, then got rid of it in order to hide the theft.
Some Twitter users are speculating that the U.S. authorities have managed to freeze and recover the stolen funds since the numbers seem to add up. This explains a series of back-to-back transfers that took place on Tuesday.
