Sooner or later, justice will be done, and that applies to everything we do. And, when it comes to the crypto industry, punishing criminals that have defrauded or hacked platforms and accounts helps not only to restore the balance in the world, but also, to remind us that financial regulators and law enforcement agencies in nearly all locations are working to provide a safer environment for people to trade crypto assets.
The most recent piece of news on that front is the arrest of two Israeli brothers that were involved in the hack of the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange, as per a report of specialized news site Finance Magnates, at the start of the week.
Eli and Assaf Gigi: the Two Suspects
The page identifies the two siblings as Eli Gigi and Assaf Gigi, a police spokesperson told the mentioned site. They are related not only to the hack of Bitfinex, but also, to other similar attacks by using the phishing method: they trick users into providing their account details and then take advantage of the granted access.
The thieves, reportedly, stole tens of millions of dollars with the shady proceedings, so arrests were due. They have not been indicted yet, but they are suspicious of leading long-term systematic crypto theft by illegally acquiring login credentials and, therefore, access to people’s accounts.
Phishing Victims
The brothers are accused of developing credential-stealing clones of some of the most relevant crypto trading platforms in the planet, as well as wallets, sending links of the phishing pages to Telegram groups and other sites where people in the industry gather for communication. The attack for which they are being taken into custody is a 2016 one, which resulted in dozens of affected accounts and users.
The money that the hackers stole in the Bitfinex 2016 attack has since been moved recently, as per multiple reports this month.
The majority of the victims, according to police sources, are from the European Union and the United States of America, two places in which law enforcement is ever-attentive to catch criminals linked to crypto scams, hacking scandals, and fraudulent activity in the industry.
The police performed a raid and found, according to the reports, a crypto wallet with a curious amount of funds: there was substantially less money than the figure that the brothers stole back in 2016. The siblings are, apparently, well achieved academically, with Eli Gigi being a graduate of a technological unit of the Isarel Defence Forces.
Most recently, as crypto specialized sites have reported since last week, a Firefox zero-day security flaw was exploited in recent attacks against Coinbase, one of the most renowned and used cryptocurrency exchanges in the planet. It was, allegedly, merged with another zero-day flaw that targeted the firm’s employees.
Bitfninex Will be Offline for Upgrades, Albeit Briefly
Speaking of Bitfinex, the site will be offline this week for a brief period of time, as it installs an upgrade. The information was reported by the crypto exchange via a Medium post.
The expected date of the upgrade will be June 26th, and the projected time that the platform will be offline is seven hours, as a maximum. The company’s hybrid counterpart, Ethfinex, will also be off the web for maintenance in the same period.
According to Bitfinex, the update will help “enhance the stability and scalability of the iFinex matching engine.” People will not be able to trade, view, or access their crypto wallets for the duration of the shutdown.
By Andres Chavez
