At 17:00 UTC on Friday (December 13), the VeChain Foundation announced that their “buyback address was compromised.” 

This was the tweet they sent out to announce this terrible news:

So, what is the buyback address that the VeChain Foundation is referring to?

Well, back on 30 June 2019, the VeChain Foundation announced a $25 million buyback plan:

In today’s announcement, the foundation says that 1.1 billion VET tokens (worth roughly $6.5 million at current VET prices) were taken from the hot wallet they were using for the buyback plan, and that these VET tokens were transferred by the hacker to 0xD802A148f38aBa4759879c33E8d04deb00cFB92b:

They go on to say that “all the addresses associated with the said hacker’s address have been tagged on VeChainStats, the list is automatically updated as soon as the hacker sends any funds from the original hacker’s address.”

VeChain Foundation “has been tracing the transfer of these VET Tokens in real-time,” and here is what they have done so far to manage this situation:

  • “We have notified all exchanges to monitor, blacklist and freeze any funds coming from the hacker address and any withdraws from the corresponding exchanging wallets.”
  • “We have launched an investigation into every fact around the address to determine the motive, method, and data flow behind this malicious act.”
  • “We have enlisted the assistance of Hacken along with its whitehat community, and vechainstats.com teams to help with monitoring and containment of the situation.”
  • “We have also started a security check immediately on the other crypto assets under the custodian of the Foundation, to make sure no further breach will occur.”
  • “We have reported this incident to law enforcement in Singapore.”

According to data from CryptoCompare, VET is currently trading at $0.005824, down 4.93% in the past 24-hour period:

VET-USD 24-Hour - 13 Dec 2019.png

We will update this article as more details become available…

Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com