Ukrainian law enforcement officers are investigating a large-scale cryptocurrency scam. A fraudster from Zhytomyr stole millions of hryvnias by hacking the wallets of his friends who trusted him.
Ukrainian law enforcement officers are investigating a large-scale cryptocurrency scam. A fraudster from Zhytomyr stole millions of hryvnias by hacking the wallets of his friends who trusted him.
The victim purchased 1.53446312 Bitcoin (BTC) and stored them on a flash card as a file called «Wallet.dat.» In early 2024, the user decided to withdraw some of the funds, but was unable to do so because he had lost part of the wallet password.
Therefore, he turned to his friend, who previously worked in IT and picked up passwords for cryptocurrency wallets. He promised the latter a monetary reward of 15% of the total amount on the wallet, asking him to restore the password. So the victim gave the scammer a flash card with the wallet and the part of the password that she remembered.
The fraudster had a criminal intent to take possession of someone else’s property through abuse of trust. He used the Hashcat program, picked up the password, logged into the «client’s» crypto wallet, and gained access to the funds.
After that, he transferred assets to the Binance crypto exchange from the victim’s crypto wallet for a total amount of $91,219, which is equivalent to 3.6 million UAH.
Another victim created her own account with a wallet on Kuna and EXMO.com in 2016-2017 and transferred her own funds to these wallets for a long time, until August 2020. Around 2012-2013, the victim met the fraudster and remained on friendly terms with him until 2022.
Later, the fraudster gained remote access to the victim’s computer, logged into the crypto wallet, and transferred $7,000 to himself.
According to the court’s decision of March 26, law enforcement officers gained access to all of the fraudster’s digital evidence, including the suspect’s mobile phones and computer equipment. After searching his apartment, the fraudster failed to appear at the court hearing, having been duly notified of the consideration of the motion, and did not provide any reasons for his absence.
