Details of the negotiations between the scammers and the victims were not disclosed as they appear to have taken place privately via Telegram.

A major cryptocurrency investor has successfully recovered $71 million worth of Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) from hackers after a dusting attack. After a series of negotiations with the hackers, the stolen funds were successfully returned to the owner.

According to a tweet from blockchain security firm PeckShield, the scammers began returning the funds on May 9 and completed the process on May 11.

$71 million in WBTC stolen

The crypto whale’s troubles began on May 3, when they accidentally sent 1,155 WBTC to a wrong address that was maliciously added to their transaction history via an address poisoning attack.

Address poisoning or dusting is a scam in which a malicious actor sends a transaction of zero or insignificant value to a victim's wallet, causing that address to appear in their transaction history. These malicious addresses often have similar beginning and ending characters to the victim's real wallet address, making them superficially undetectable.

Media reports said that in this incident, the characters of the address used by the scammers and the real address both started with "0xd9A1" and ended with "853a91". This caused the victim to be deceived in the process of trying to transfer WBTC to another wallet.

Five days later, the scammers began to process the stolen assets, and they began to split them into smaller shares. They used more than 400 different wallets and dispersed the funds to about 150 different addresses. Of particular note is that on May 3, they converted the stolen funds into about 23,000 Ether (ETH).

Recovery process

Details about the negotiations between the scammers and the victims are unknown as the discussions appear to have taken place on Telegram.

On May 5, the victim contacted the scammers and offered to pay a 10% return in exchange for their stolen funds. The victim also worked with blockchain security company Match Systems and cryptocurrency exchange platform Cryptex to warn the scammers that if there was no response by May 6, they would take action to track down the funds.

After a few days of silence, the scammer sent some Ether (ETH) to the victim, along with a message asking the victim to provide their Telegram account for a proper discussion. In the subsequent conversation, the attacker returned the stolen property in batches. As for why the malicious actor chose to return the assets in full and gave up the 10% bounty offer, it is not clear.

Meanwhile, the value of the returned assets is approximately $66.8 million, as Ether (ETH) has fallen more than Bitcoin (BTC) over the past week.

Ethereum has fallen more than 6.4% during the same period, while bitcoin has fallen about 2.8%, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Conclusion

The recovery of the $71 million WBTC dust attack demonstrates that in the cryptocurrency space, even in the face of sophisticated cyber theft, it is possible to successfully recover stolen funds through proactive actions by victims, expertise of security companies, and cooperation of trading platforms. The incident highlights the need to take strict security measures and remain vigilant when conducting cryptocurrency transactions.

In addition, although the recovery operation was successful, the incident also exposed the security loopholes in cryptocurrency transactions. This requires technological advancement and stricter security protocols to protect user assets, and also calls for strengthened international cooperation to combat cybercrime and ensure the security and transparency of digital asset transactions. #粉尘攻击 #被盗资金