A cryptocurrency transaction monitor has revealed further funds stolen from the Bitfinex exchange have recently moved to an unknown wallet.
Twitter-based Whale Alert (@whale_alert), which monitors large transactions between exchanges, wallets and between both, signalled in a post on the social network that more than 30 bitcoins, worth around $351,000, had been transferred to a new wallet.
⚠ 30.667542 #BTC (351,015 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Bitfinex Hack 2016 to unknown wallet
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) August 12, 2019
2016 Hack
The transferred funds were known to be part of the bitcoins stolen in 2016 when hackers targeted Bitfinex, and made off with nearly 120,000 bitcoins (then worth more than $66 million and at today’s rates, more than $1.3 billion).
Much of the stolen bitcoin remained missing, but transaction monitors have been able to detect movement of some of the funds from time to time as the addresses associated with the Bitfinex hack are publicly known. What remains unknown is who owns these addresses.
So far, however, only relatively small portions of the stolen funds have been moved, the biggest being back in June this year when Twitter account @whale_alert revealed five transactions totaling 172.54 bitcoin from the hacker’s wallet to an unknown address. These funds were worth around $1.37 million at the time.
Funds Recovered
And only a small amount of the funds stolen have ever been retrieved since Bitfinex revealed on its blog in February that US authorities had recovered 27.7 bitcoins.
Bitfinex is currently fighting a lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General that alleges the exchange dipped into the dollar reserves of its affiliate Tether to fill an $850 million hole in its finances.