The author of the cryptocurrency fraud is Florentine. 120 million "hole", 230 thousand defrauded

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21 December 2020 He is the author of the largest cyber-financial attack ever carried out in Italy and one of the largest in the world in the cryptocurrency sector.

The postal police identified

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The man is accused of computer fraud, self-laundering and fraudulent bankruptcy.

The investigators of the Postal Police of Florence and of the Financial Cybercrime Section of the Central Service of the Postal Police in Rome, of the Guardia di Finanza of the Judicial Police Section of the Public Prosecutor's Office of Florence, notified him of the precautionary measure of the prohibition to exercise enterprise and to hold executive offices of enterprises

The provision issued by the investigating judge of Florence, Gianluca Mancuso, concerns the sole director of an Italian company that manages a cryptocurrency exchange platform.

The investigation began in February 2018, after the complaint presented by the sole administrator of the exchange platform, for the theft of a large sum in "NANO" XRP cryptocurrency for a value of about 120 million euros, made exploiting a bug in the Nano protocol and carrying out illicit transactions, all relating to January 2018. The man was already known to investigators to whom he provided Bitcoin to pay the 'ransoms' of cryptolocker victims.

The investigators began to suspect him from the very first stages of the investigation, despite collaborating in order not to suggest that he was involved in the affair.

The investigations, which went on for months also with the support of the FBI, with interceptions and complex computer analysis activities of the exchange platform's databases, brought to light the man's responsibilities and demonstrated that the theft of cryptocurrency occurred in more resumed, starting from June 2017, and that the man knowingly did not prevent them by failing to implement the security of the platform with one of the available methods disclosed by Team Nano Developers (American company creator of the cryptocurrency), thus providing hackers, not still identified, a profit of about 11,500,000 XRB, equivalent to about 12 million euros, damaging more than 230,000 people worldwide (moreover with the aggravating circumstance of having committed the facts with abuse of the quality of system operator).

The investigators, with the collaboration of the UIF (Financial Intelligence Unit) officials of the Bank of Italy and the PG Section of the Florence Public Prosecutor's Office, ascertained that three days before the filing of the complaint, the man had transferred to his account staff, based at the digital currency exchanger company "The Rock Trading Srl" of Malta, as many as 230 Bitcoin BTC cryptocurrencies (which at the exchange rate in the reference period corresponded to approximately 1,700,000 euros), attributable to the customers of the exchange platform.

3,652 addresses out of 3,890 total (which originated the transactions on the personal account, were found to be present in the database of the exchange platform, however not detectable by consulting the databases relating to traditional monetary and financial assets, so that it was impossible to trace their origin. Values ​​that the man, in May 2018, partially transformed into legal currency by converting it into the sum of 514 thousand euros through trading operations. Several times he tried to withdraw to "empty" the account, but the intervention of the owners of the investigation prevented it by seizing all the accounts of the suspect, including the results in cryptocurrency up to the equivalent of 120 million euros.