The hackers who on January 26th stole around 530 million US dollars in NEM coins from Coincheck, the biggest Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, have started moving some of the stolen coins to different addresses, according to Jeff McDonald, the Vice President of NEM Foundation.
Reuters communicated a report saying the NEM Foundation managed to discover the transactions performed by the hackers. The transactions contain 100 NEM coins each and are being sent to randomly selected addresses.
Tom Robinson, the co-founder of Elliptic, a security company from Britain, said: “When people are trying to launder this kind of assets, they sometimes divide them into smaller transactions, because it is less likely they would trigger the mechanisms for the prevention of money laundering operations.”
Contrary to the report from Reuters, it seems the hackers are not trying to earn money by moving the stolen coins to some of the cryptocurrency exchanges. This is what Paul Rieger, the co-founder of New Economy Movement (NEM) in Europe, confirmed in an email sent to CoinDesk at the end of January: “There was eleven transactions, each containing 100 XEM coins, sent from one of the hacker addresses to randomly selected addresses, nothing was sold, nor there was any attempts to send transactions to one of the cryptocurrency exchanges.”
Coincheck, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in Japan, announced on January 26th the robbery of around 520 million NEM coins from its wallet. After the hacker attack, the company promised to reimburse all the affected users, around 260,000 of them.
