The US authorities accused two British teenagers in Colorado of allegedly stealing a crypto wallet with around $772,000 worth in Bitcoin (BTC). According to The Telegraph & Argus, citing court documents filed in Denver, Colorado, the individuals installed a clipboard hijacking malware in the victim’s device and then stole 16.4552 BTC.
“The Malware was designed by defendants to clandestinely install itself on the hard drive of the victim’s computer and to monitor the victim’s computer activity by secretly requesting that the computer run a pattern-matching algorithm each time the victim used the copy-paste (or ‘clipboard’) function on his computer,” a Colorado court noted. The computer of Andrew Schober, the victim, was infiltrated by the teenagers because he was persuaded to install a software dubbed ‘Electrum Atom’.
The incident happened around January 2018, and as of press time, 16.4552 Bitcoins are worth $772,120.77, as the cryptocurrency is exchanging hands near the $47,000 threshold. In addition, authorities revealed that both teenagers are from Bradford and Southampton, UK. Also, it is known that both of the guys know of technology-related resources because of their studies on computer science.
Victim Attempted to Trace Thieves
Moreover, the court documents noted that Schober spent almost $10,000 to track people who stole his BTC. In fact, 95% of his net wealth was placed on his crypto holdings. “In or about October 2018, Mr Schober emailed a letter to the defendants demanding that they return the cryptocurrency stolen from [him]. As of the date of this complaint, the defendants have not responded to Mr Schober’s request that they return his cryptocurrency,” the US authorities stated.
In an unrelated case in New Zealand, a former employee from the disgraced New Zealand-based cryptocurrency Exchange , Cryptopia pleaded guilty to stealing $176,000 worth of crypto assets and customer data from the platform. The former employee, who was no named by the court, admitted the crime before Judge Gerard Lynch at the Christchurch District Court on Monday.
