Bitfinex Froze $860,000 in Bitcoins
By Marko Vidrih on The Capital
A British court ordered the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange to freeze assets worth $860,000 in Bitcoin. As the exchange and the crypto-analytical company Chainalysis managed to find out, they were related to the activities of ransomware, reports New Money Review.
The insurance company of the victim of the attack, represented by an unnamed company, paid the attackers $950,000 (109.25 BTC) and went to court. Some of the funds were withdrawn to fiat and turned out to be inaccessible for further tracking, while 96 BTC went to a Bitfinex-controlled address.
The court decided to freeze these assets and requested Bitfinex identification information of the wallet owner. According to the New Money Review, this is the first time that the High Court of England and Wales has agreed to treat Bitcoin as property.
Chainalysis Director of Public Relations Madeleine Kennedy said that the leading cyber insurer used Chainalysis software to investigate the payment to the ransomware program made by him on behalf of the client to track the movement of funds from the repayment point to well-known services such as exchanges.
Initially, Bitfinex and its parent company iFinex went on trial as defendants. However, the exchange itself explained that it assisted the plaintiff in finding assets and was not charged with any crime.
Bitfinex “has robust systems in place to allow it to assist law enforcement authorities and litigants in cases such as this,” the company said. — “In this case we have assisted the claimant to trace the stolen bitcoin and we understand the focus of the claimant’s attention is no longer on the Bitfinex platform. It now appears Bitfinex is an entirely innocent party mixed up in this wrongdoing.”
According to the court’s order, Bitfinex was supposed to transfer the data of the attacker to the court before January 18, but nothing was reported about further actions of the exchange.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Featured image credit: Pixabay
