Hackers who stole $ 100 million refused a million reward for returning cryptocurrency

According to security experts PeckShieldAlert on Twitter, the hackers started transferring the stolen funds to Tornado Cash (a decentralized service that allows for private transactions — we wrote about its operation in detail). It seems that the hackers, as well as members of the cryptocurrency community, found the $ 1 million reward for the return of $ 100 million in cryptocurrency to be a «drop in the bucket.»

#PeckShieldAlert ~18k $ETH (~22m) into 0x1e…6430 from @harmonyprotocol exploiters pic.twitter.com/NN4j5Korsz

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) June 27, 2022

Earlier, part of the $ 100 million stolen by hackers from the Harmony blockchain was recovered. AAG Ventures, which suffered the largest losses, used a mitigation tool to protect the stolen funds belonging to Lossless DeFi. As a result, Lossless managed to freeze about $ 78 million of stolen funds. Due to a coincidence, they launched their own Harmony-based protocol just 1 day before the hacker attack and were able to intervene quickly.

Earlier, representatives of the Harmony protocol announced that they had stopped the Horizon bridge to ensure the safety of users' funds. The startup’s developers said that they started working with the FBI and crypto security experts to recover the stolen funds. However, due to the proposed $ 1 million (which turned out to be insufficient), it is now unknown what will happen to the entire amount.