Beijing High Court: A blockchain engineer took advantage of his position to make illegal profits and was sentenced to three years and six months in prison
On September 14, according to the Beijing High People's Court official account, Zhang, a blockchain engineer at a network company, learned that there was a large amount of Ethereum in the project account while participating in the company's development of a project. He had a crooked idea and wanted to attack the company account to obtain Ethereum. Taking advantage of his work, he asked his colleagues for program codes and private keys that were beyond his work authority on the grounds of "code learning".
According to Zhang, he once joined a "technical exchange group" where members could obtain virtual currency for arbitrage by cracking the code, so he shared the code and private key with the group and invited group member Jack to crack the code and attack the company account to obtain 106.15 Ethereum. Zhang said that he would "wash the Ethereum" he obtained and planned to distribute it after the price rose later. After converting Ethereum into other forms of currency, he transferred it through multiple accounts such as his wife and then transferred it back to his own account. After the company discovered that the virtual currency in its account had been stolen, it quickly reported the case. After the prosecution was filed by the procuratorate, the Changping Court formed a collegial panel to hear the case in public.
After trial, the Changping Court held that, based on the evidence in the case, such as the circulation of the Ethereum involved, the information on the Ethereum code address and the corresponding private key extracted from Zhang's computer, the chat between Zhang and his wife containing "money laundering" and related witness testimony, it was sufficient to determine that the defendant Zhang violated the regulations, asked others for program codes and private keys, illegally obtained Ethereum information in the company's computer system, and profited from some Ethereum transactions. In the end, the court sentenced the defendant Zhang to three years and six months in prison and a fine of RMB 60,000 for the crime of illegally obtaining computer information system data. At the same time, the defendant Zhang's illegal gains of RMB 38,329.76 were recovered and confiscated according to law. After the first-instance judgment, the defendant Zhang appealed. The second-instance ruling dismissed the appeal and upheld the original judgment. The case is now effective.
