Exposing the cybercriminal's methods of using games to launder money.
Anonymous blockchain analyst ZachXBT discovered that a hacker who hacked the DeFi Uranium Finance platform in 2021 used the card game Magic: The Gathering to launder part of the funds. After hacking Uranium Finance, which resulted in the loss of $50 million, including 80 bitcoins, 1,800 ETH and other assets, the attacker sent 2,438 ETH to Tornado Cash, and also converted other cryptocurrencies to ETH and bitcoin.
In 2021, the hacker withdrew about 11,200 ETH from Tornado Cash in portions of 100 coins, then exchanged them for "wrapped" ETH (WETH), transferred them to a new address and exchanged them for USDC stablecoins. He used some of these funds to buy Magic: The Gathering cards. To make purchases, the hacker turned to an American broker who contacted sellers on his behalf, while the buyer never revealed his identity to the sellers. He spent millions on starter decks, alpha packs, and sealed boxes of cards, which he paid 5-10% more for.
In addition to buying cards, some of the funds were transferred to the centralized exchanges Kraken, Bitpay and Coinbase. These steps, according to ZachXBT, were taken to make it more difficult to track funds to their source, which was probably a hack of Uranium Finance in 2021.
The hack of Uranium Finance, which occurred in April 2021, was one of the most significant incidents in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi). This incident resulted in the loss of approximately $50 million as a result of an error in the protocol code. Uranium Finance is a fork of the popular DeFi platform Uniswap V2 and is based on the Binance Smart Chain. During the migration to the V2 version of the protocol, the hacker used a calculation error to withdraw various cryptocurrencies from the system, including Bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), as well as Binance USD (BUSD), Tether (USDT), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Wrapped BNB (wBNB) and native Uranium U92 tokens.
Anonymous blockchain analyst ZachXBT discovered that a hacker who hacked the DeFi Uranium Finance platform in 2021 used the card game Magic: The Gathering to launder part of the funds. After hacking Uranium Finance, which resulted in the loss of $50 million, including 80 bitcoins, 1,800 ETH and other assets, the attacker sent 2,438 ETH to Tornado Cash, and also converted other cryptocurrencies to ETH and bitcoin.
In 2021, the hacker withdrew about 11,200 ETH from Tornado Cash in portions of 100 coins, then exchanged them for "wrapped" ETH (WETH), transferred them to a new address and exchanged them for USDC stablecoins. He used some of these funds to buy Magic: The Gathering cards. To make purchases, the hacker turned to an American broker who contacted sellers on his behalf, while the buyer never revealed his identity to the sellers. He spent millions on starter decks, alpha packs, and sealed boxes of cards, which he paid 5-10% more for.
In addition to buying cards, some of the funds were transferred to the centralized exchanges Kraken, Bitpay and Coinbase. These steps, according to ZachXBT, were taken to make it more difficult to track funds to their source, which was probably a hack of Uranium Finance in 2021.
The hack of Uranium Finance, which occurred in April 2021, was one of the most significant incidents in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi). This incident resulted in the loss of approximately $50 million as a result of an error in the protocol code. Uranium Finance is a fork of the popular DeFi platform Uniswap V2 and is based on the Binance Smart Chain. During the migration to the V2 version of the protocol, the hacker used a calculation error to withdraw various cryptocurrencies from the system, including Bitcoin (BTC), ethereum (ETH), as well as Binance USD (BUSD), Tether (USDT), Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Wrapped BNB (wBNB) and native Uranium U92 tokens.
