What happened

In May, after a three-year investigation, the institution seized more than $500,000 in the dollar-pegged cryptocurrency Tether. The owners of two Binance accounts were suspected of laundering money from the sale of prohibited substances.

The attacker was monitoring the regulator’s online activity at the time and noticed that the DEA had sent a $45.36 test amount to one of the US Justice Department’s wallets. The scammer then quickly created a similar cryptocurrency wallet whose address matches the first five and last four characters of the wallet. police serviceand performed the alleged reverse action on behalf of the department.

The attacker hoped that the department employee would copy the fake wallet address and see it in the transactions list when sending another amount in the future. Crypto addresses are so long that people often copy and paste instead of re-entering them each time.

It finally happened – the scammer received $ 55 thousand. When the mistake was discovered, they tried to block the funds, but by then the funds had already been converted to another currency.

Who is behind this?

Working with the FBI, the DEA determined that the funds had been converted to Ethereum and transferred to a new wallet. Investigators were unable to identify the user of this wallet, but did spot two accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, where the scammer is paying for the use of the computing power of the Ether network. Two Gmail addresses were used to register these accounts with Binance, and representatives now hope that Google will have some identifying information about users.

Whoever is behind this has transferred large sums of money to Ethereum in recent months. The scammer currently has almost $40,000 in cryptocurrencies in his wallet, but has received $425,000 since June. Over the past three weeks, more than $300,000 of that has been transferred to seven different wallets.