About 58 billion yen worth of illegally stolen virtual currency called NEM was transferred to 20 accounts, including nine that received transfers Tuesday night, it has been learned.
The money was first stolen Friday through the hacking of the major cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck. The Metropolitan Police Department is investigating on suspicion of violations of the Law on Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access, and believes that whoever is responsible is trying to delay investigators' pursuit.
About 58 billion yen worth of NEM was sent to an account via eight transfers from 0:02 a.m. to 0:21 a.m. on Friday, followed by three more transfers from 3:35 a.m. to 8:26 a.m. the same day.
The transferred NEM was then sent to eight accounts early Friday morning, and to another account at 11:42 p.m. that day. Some of the digital money was further transferred to another account and then sent back.
Currency transfers temporarily appeared to have ceased but they resumed at 10:33 p.m. on Tuesday from the account to which NEM was first sent from Coincheck, and continued for about 30 minutes until 11:02 p.m.
Nine accounts then each received NEM worth about 11,000 yen each (the rate when the hacking occurred), and currency was sent twice to two of these accounts. One of the accounts was found to have had no connection to the person who hacked Coincheck, according to a person in charge of information security.
As a result, about 58 billion yen worth of NEM was transferred to 20 accounts, including the account to which NEM was first sent from Coincheck. Among them, currency was sent back from one account, meaning the NEM has now been spread across 19 accounts.
An international foundation promoting the distribution of NEM and other groups are currently tracking the record of the transmissions in question, asking other cryptocurrency exchanges neither to cash nor conduct any transactions with them.
Asked about the intention behind the flurry of transfers, Kaoru Hayashi of information security firm Palo Alto Networks Inc. said the hacker "may have sent the money to a number of unrelated accounts."
The suspect likely tried to make it harder for investigators to detect the money by spreading it across a number of accounts.
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