In March this year ShapeShift, the cryptocurrency conversion service, was swindled out of around $200,000 USD worth of BTC/ETH/LTC. A chunk of that money - 315 BTC - has been sitting at the same address since it was stolen. Until last week…
The story behind the hack is fascinating, more so because of the transparency with which ShapeShift – via CEO Erik Voorhees – shared intimate details of the attack. It turns out to have been an inside job: funds were initially stolen by an employee, then more was stolen by a hacker to whom this employee had sold sensitive company information.
Luckily, ShapeShift does not hold any funds on behalf of users so it was ‘only’ company money that was stolen which helped to insulate them from much negative fallout.
I highly recommend reading the article “Looting of the Fox: The Story of Sabotage at ShapeShift” written by Erik Voorhees about the hack, it’s totally worth it: https://news.bitcoin.com/looting-fox-sabotage-shapeshift/
If reading isn’t your thing you could listen to the interview the Epicenter Bitcoin guys did with Erik Voorhees shortly after this all went down: https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/epicenter-bitcoin-130-erik-voorhees-fooling-the-fox-the-story-of-the-shapeshift-hack
Voorhees describes the initial theft by a recently hired company employee, ‘Bob’, of 315 BTC and even shares the address to which the stolen coins were sent.
I checked out the address on Blockchain.info yesterday and noticed that someone (presumably Bob, or someone connected to Bob) had moved funds from that address on 30th June. The money moved four times over two days. The end result? Around 35 BTC (~24K USD) was moved to other addresses and the remaining 278 BTC is now sitting in a new address. You can view the transactions yourself by following the money from the initial address here:
https://blockchain.info/address/1LchKFYxkugq3EPMoJJp5cvUyTyPMu1qBR
I did some searching and haven’t found any mention of this online yet. Not sure if ‘Bob’ has been apprehended, if he’s still ‘on the run’ and trying to get some cash to fund his new life on the lam, if the ShapeShift guys somehow managing to get their hands on some of the loot, or if there’s more to the story than has been shared so far...
It seems the story is not over. I wonder if we'll hear anything else on this from the ShapeShift team?