Stole and donate: Robin Hood stole crypto worth $50 million to donate to charity

This is disheartening…

Blaine couldn’t stop sweating as he stared at his computer screen. He had $50,000 in cryptocurrencies in his account, but it was suddenly worthless.

Blaine, 25, had invested all of the money he had gained from trading NFTs over the previous year, only months after graduating from law school, in the hopes of starting a life with his fiancée. He had put $50,000 in USD Coin (USDC) into a liquidity pool of assets for stablecoins USDC and Cashio nine days before, but it was worthless when he tried to withdraw it on Wednesday.

Blaine was one of the dozens of victims of a cyberattack that netted a scammer more than $50 million. He asked that only his first name be published for privacy concerns. The criminals took advantage of a weakness in Cashio’s core technology, which is tied to the price of the US dollar.

About 2 billion more cryptocurrency tokens were produced by the attacker.

Promising to return stolen funds

The hacker or hackers, according to CashioApp, used an “unlimited mint” bug to manufacture counterfeit CASH, Cashio’s stablecoin token. According to a study by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, the attacker manufactured around 2 billion more tokens of the cryptocurrency, which the hacker swapped for other types of stablecoins using CashioApp.

The hacker transferred funds from the Solana blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain and traded them for Ether via numerous additional stablecoin exchanges and the so-called “bridges,” Jupiter and Wormhole. According to Rita Martin, a blockchain investigator at TRM Labs, the money was in the attacker’s crypto wallet as of 4 p.m. Friday.

Within some hours of the heist, the scammer to the public in promising to return stolen funds to anyone with less than $100,000 in the affected liquidity pools. It will allow people to exchange one type of cryptocurrency for an equal amount of another from a pool of collective funds. “All additional money will be donated to charity,” the scam continued, a claim that could not be substantiated.

Instead of delivering the funds to individual crypto wallets, where they would be immediately available to the victims, the hacker returned the funds to the liquidity pool accounts, which the victims are unable to access.

Blaine acknowledges responsibility for his losses as a result of his decision to invest his money with Cashio rather than another asset, but he believes the money should be paid in the manner intended by the scam. Following the fraudster’s wishes, according to Blaine, could assist Cashio or the authorities to recover more money from the scammer for everyone.

Blaine most hopes, though, that the scammer has a change of heart and decides to refund all of the stolen money.

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Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing