Willie Sutton who was once a notorious bank robber of the 70s was asked, why he targets banks for stealing money. He responded with a smile on his face that all the money goes into the bank.
But the world has changed a great deal since Sutton’s times and now there are innumerable ways of stealing money and causing loss to the exchequer.
Traders of Crypto is an independent organization that monitors online theft, fraud, and scams. The organization has recently published a report in which it has suggested that Bitcoin is the most attractive thing in the world for bandits. The report suggested further that the perks contained in Bitcoin are the ones that enticed people like Sutton. For them, Bitcoin is like a vault full of money or a secret vault hidden by a rich person in his home.
The report speaks about and discusses some of the major scams and cybercrimes that occurred in the past decade. The report contains bank robbers and online frauds committed upon banks in various countries. However, half of the incidents involved stealing and scamming of cryptocurrencies, the report suggested. In addition, the money lost due to crypto thefts is far more greater than any bank robbery i.e. US$ 2.5 Billion.
Almost 80% of these thefts i.e. US$ 2 Billion belonged to Bitcoin.
The report noted that at least 41 attempts of crypto thefts were made. Out of these 41 attempts, 30 were successful while the rest of 11 were hit and miss. While there are only 4 instances where Bitcoin funds were stolen and were later on recovered. This clearly shows that in terms of recovering the funds, there is a huge vacuum. For sure, crypto criminals are taking a leader from their traditional rivals and most of the time remain anonymous without getting caught.
While in the case of traditional bandits, authorities are able to identify the culprits, and most of the time they are brought before trials. However, in the case of crypto thefts, the situation is quite opposite. Neither the culprits are caught nor there is any legal cover so far provided to a victim.
One of the largest crypto theft was of KuCoin, a crypto trading platform, which happened to lose billions to scammers. However, still the trading platform is in the process of recovering stolen funds, yet it lost almost 2 Billion Dollars to scammers.
But the first-ever crypto theft involved an early crypto exchange namely Mt. Gox. Soon after the invention of Bitcoin in 2009, Mt. Gox was launched in Tokyo Japan. In between 2011 and 2013 the firm lost 750,000 Bitcoin belonging to its customers. Though the majority of looted funds have been refunded back to Mt. Gox’s customers, however, it was a successful first attempt of crypto hackers. Even to this day, the firm is looking for who was behind the hack attack.
