Chinese mining giant Bitmain is suing an anonymous hacker that allegedly stole $5.5 million in cryptocurrency last April from the company’s account on the digital exchange Binance.
The hacker’s identity is still unknown, and he’s described only as “John Doe” in official court documents, which were filed in accordance with the lawsuit on November 7, 2018, with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle. The documents state that the hacker managed to take over the company’s Binance account, then use bitcoin stored in the account to purchase ether tokens. These tokens were utilized to buy and manipulate the price of an altcoin known as MANA coin (MANA).
John Doe then transferred the MANA into a separate Binance account they controlled. The documents explain, “Upon further information and belief, John Doe took his/her market manipulating and theft scam a step further by essentially reversing the same orchestrated trades between Bitmain’s wallet and John Doe’s wallet using a deflated MANA price. While accessing Bitmain’s digital wallet without authority, John Doe placed an order to sell MANA out of Bitmain’s digital wallet at a deflated price. At the same time, John Doe placed a purchase order for MANA at that deflated price from John Doe’s Binance wallet.”
They continue to say, “Binance’s automated system matched the deflated MANA sell order with the deflated MANA purchase order and executed the trade, and John Doe obtained significant gains at the expense of Bitmain. As a result, John Doe benefitted twice from transferring MANA into and out of Bitmain’s digital wallet.”
Once these steps were completed, the court filing reports that the hacker transferred all the crypto funds from the theft into a wallet on Bittrex, a competing digital asset exchange. John Doe then cashed in on the
