Former Security Engineer Sentenced to Three Years in Prison for Attacking Two DEXs to Steal $12 Million in Cryptocurrency

Damien Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that former security engineer Shakib Ahmed has been blocked for hacking into two separate decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges and stealing cryptocurrencies worth more than $12 million. On July 2, 2022, Ahmed used false pricing data to attack a crypto exchange, stealing approximately $9 million in fees, and on July 28, 2022, he conducted another attack on Nirvana Finance. He laundered the money each using a sophisticated technique that included converting the proceeds of the fraud into the hard-to-trace cryptocurrency, Monroe Coin, and using offshore cryptocurrency exchanges and cryptocurrency mixers. The case is being handled by the Prosecutor's Office's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit and the Complex Fraud and Cybercrime Unit.