Europol Arrested 10 hackers that stole 100 million in cryptos from ...

As the title suggests Europol arrested 10 hackers that stole 100 million dollars in cryptos from celebrities through sim swapping attacks. Let's take it from the beginning though and understand firstly what Europol is.

For all of you that don't know, Europol is the European Union's law enforcement agency. They are trying to make Europe and more specifically EU a safer place for all and their headquarters are in Hague, Netherlands. There are also offices in countries across Europe that aren't part of the European Union.

So 10 hackers throughout 2020 managed to steal around 100 million dollars in crypto from celebrities like musicians, sports stars, and internet influencers. They did that by gaining access to their phones. In order to get them, the investigation started around 1 year ago in many and different countries.

Sim Swapping

According to Europol this is a new and upcoming trend of stealing and to quote them

It involves cybercriminals taking over use of a victim’s phone number by essentially deactivating their SIM and porting the allocated number over to a SIM belonging to a member of the criminal network.

They achieve that either by using social engineering techniques or simply by having a "guy" that they pay him, in order to receive the data. To see how big this whole investigation was check below in the screen the other agencies that took part in the operation

As you can see the more we come close to mass adoption and cryptos gain more spotlight, the more scammers are getting involved as well. We got crypto scams that in total worth more than 15 billion dollars, so we are talking about a lot of money.