$71M WBTC Dust Attack Victim Recovers Stolen Loot

Cryptowell, which lost $71 million worth of wrapped bitcoins (WBTC) in a dustup, has recovered the stolen funds after speaking with the hacker.

According to a tweet by blockchain security firm PeckShield, the fraudster began withdrawing the funds on May 9 and completed the process on May 11.

Stealing $71M WBTC

The whale's woes began with address poisoning on May 3 after they mistakenly sent 1,155 WBTC to an address saved in their transaction history.

Address poisoning or dusting is a scam where a malicious actor sends zero or no value to a victim's wallet to make the address appear in their transaction history. These malicious addresses often have the same first and last characters as the victim's real wallets, which makes them invisible on the surface.

As CryptoPotato reported, the malicious and genuine addresses had characters starting with 0xd9A1 and ending with 853a91 in this case. Hence, the victim was tricked when he wanted to transfer his WBCC to another wallet.

The thief did not move the stolen property until five days later when they began to divide it into small parts. They used more than 400 wallets to distribute the money to 150 addresses. Specifically, on May 3, they converted the loot to 23,000 Ether (ETH).

The recovery

Details of the negotiations between the scammer and the victim are not available as the conversation was apparently held on Telegram.

The victim first contacted the scammer on May 5 and offered 10% of the stolen money. Teaming up with blockchain cyber security firm Match Systems and crypto exchange Cryptex, the attacker threatened to go after the money if he didn't respond by May 6.

After a few days of silence, the scammer sent the victim some ETH. After the conversation, the attacker returned the loot to the group. It is not known why the malicious actor gave up the 10% bonus and returned the assets in their entirety.

Meanwhile, the value of recovered assets reaches $66.8 million as Ether has fallen more than BTC in the past week. According to data from CoinMarketCap, ETH fell more than 6.4% while BTC fell 2.8% in the same time frame.