Stupid hacker: stole 188 bitcoins and used 120,000 yuan to keep the network administrator quiet. The stupid thief was robbed by the hacker

I was recently reviewing some thefts involving Bitcoin, and I was a little amused by some of the details in the cases:

Shanghai hacker Dai rewrote a Bitcoin wallet with hacker techniques and strongly recommended the use of this wallet in his group, stealing 188.31 Bitcoins from his fan Wu. When Wu questioned him, Dai even offered her 120,000 yuan to keep quiet.

Zhong, a network administrator of a company in Haidian, Beijing, hacked into the company's server and stole 100 bitcoins earned from mining. In order to avoid being discovered by the police, Zhong searched online for a core wallet that claimed to "completely cover up the traces of transfers" and transferred 10 bitcoins into it. After the police cracked the case, Zhong discovered that the wallet was actually a phishing website...

The suspects in these two hacker theft cases are more stupid than each other.

The two cases, the former was the first case of hacker stealing Bitcoin in the country, and the latter was the first case of Bitcoin theft in Beijing.

First Bitcoin Heist: Hackers Were Technically Smart, But Dumbly

In July 2017, Wu, a resident of Puyang, Henan Province, reported to the criminal police that 188.31 bitcoins stored in his online wallet had been stolen, with a value of more than 6 million yuan on the day the report was filed.

Although the police officer who took the case did not know what Bitcoin was at the time, he decided to open an investigation the next day due to his sensitivity to the "significant value of the case and the first digital currency theft case in the country."

In fact, the case was easy to solve: Wu was a professional investor who had bought 188.31 bitcoins in the past two years, spending a total of more than 2 million yuan.

But Wu felt that he was an outsider, so he liked to join online discussion groups to exchange and learn from each other. In the process, he joined the WeChat group established by Dai. Dai appeared as an expert and specialized in popularizing how to trade cryptocurrencies to his fans.

During this process, Dai strongly recommended that fans use a "Bitcoin wallet" to store Bitcoin. When someone was interested, Dai would take the initiative to send them the wallet installation file.

It was under the guidance of Dai that Wu installed the wallet and transferred all his bitcoins into this wallet.

Since the market was not good at that time, Wu went traveling after transferring his Bitcoin. (I still remember that many experts said that Bitcoin would definitely reach $100,000, so just buy it and forget about it)

After returning from the trip, Wu found that the bitcoins in his wallet were missing. When he went to find Dai again, Dai hesitated and made excuses. Later, Dai even said that he was responsible for the matter and that if Wu gave up the pursuit, he would compensate him with ten bitcoins.

Later, although Dai did not give ten bitcoins, he did transfer 120,000 yuan in cash to Wu through WeChat.

Having written this far, you, as a smart person, now know what’s going on, right?

It was obvious that there was something wrong with the wallet given by Dai.

This led to Wu reporting the case.

The hacker hid his tracks through hundreds of accounts, but was stupid enough to use 120,000 yuan to keep it quiet

Police arrested Dai in a residential area in Pudong, Shanghai, and seized 27 bank cards, three computers, multiple mobile phones and the seal of a company registered in Hong Kong that Dai used to launder money.

When the police officers in charge of the case were interviewed by the media, they expressed their incomprehension of Dai's behavior: in order to cover up the traces of stealing Bitcoins, Dai transferred money between hundreds of Bitcoin accounts, and after selling them at low prices on domestic exchanges (the country had not yet regulated Bitcoin transactions at the time of the incident), he also laundered money through a Hong Kong company. All of these performances were very professional.

But the same Dai was looking for prey among his fans in the group, recommending the installation of a Bitcoin wallet that he had tampered with, waiting for an opportunity to steal and transfer money. Once the case was discovered, he used various excuses to shirk responsibility and tried to silence them with money. This method was very stupid!

In the words of the victim Wu, "If he didn't do it, why would he give me 120,000 yuan? After all, it's not a small amount of money."

Later, the police found out that Dai had committed three crimes using the same method and stole bitcoins worth more than 20 million yuan.

Another stupidity of network administrator Zhong: He stole 100 bitcoins and was cheated out of 10

As the suspect in Beijing's first Bitcoin theft case, network administrator Zhong is another kind of fool.

Before the incident, Zhong was the network administrator of a bitcoin giant in Haidian. He heard that bitcoin was very valuable, so in September 2017, he remotely hacked into the company's server and transferred 100 bitcoins obtained from the company's mining to his own wallet. (There are not many companies that can mine 100 bitcoins. Can you guess which one it is?)

At around 18:00 on the evening of September 25, 2017, police officers from the Xisanqi Police Station of the Haidian Branch received a report from a technology company in the area, saying that the company's computer information system had been damaged and 100 bitcoins worth millions of RMB had been stolen.

After the police inspected the site, they found that although the suspect had remotely hacked into the company's account, he had used the company's password to get through the system's primary protection, which showed that the suspect was a thief in the company. After investigation, the police finally determined that the company's network administrator, Zhong, was a major suspect.

In the early morning of January 2, 2018, the police summoned Zhong to the police station. After interrogation, Zhong admitted to the crime.

According to Zhong, after stealing the bitcoins, he heard that there was a more core wallet that could clear the tracks of the theft, so he moved 10 bitcoins to the "core wallet". However, before he sold the bitcoins, he found that the 10 bitcoins he had deposited were gone.

It turned out that this "core wallet" was set up by a phishing website, and Zhong was robbed. After the incident, Zhong only returned 90 bitcoins, and the 10 bitcoins that were defrauded were never heard from again.

In March 2018, the Haidian Procuratorate approved the arrest of Zhong on suspicion of illegally obtaining data from a computer information system.

Experts remind cryptocurrency investors to pay attention to trading risks

Heiqishi interviewed relevant security experts, who suggested that ordinary cryptocurrency holders should take the following protective measures:

1. When downloading a wallet, be sure to download it from the official website. Do not download it from a search engine (you know what I mean), do not download it from small and medium-sized app stores, do not download it from QQ groups or WeChat groups, and if it is an iOS version of the wallet, do not download it from a jailbreak store.

2. If necessary, perform a hash comparison on the wallet installation file after downloading.

3. If you use the Android system, you must keep the system updated (if it is a domestic mobile phone system, do not turn off scheduled updates), and install mobile security software, such as Tencent Mobile Manager, Norton Mobile Antivirus, etc.

4. The transaction password should be complex, preferably more than 12 characters, with letters, numbers and special symbols. Be sure to enable the two-step verification function to reduce the risk of password leakage.