Hackers who stole 120,000 Bitcoins from Bitfinex have begun moving their loot, now worth nearly $130 million

The hacker who stole 120,000 bitcoins from the Hong Kong bitcoin exchange Bitfinex on August 2, 2016 has now begun to transfer his "spoils" on the bitcoin network. At the current bitcoin price, these 120,000 bitcoins are worth nearly $130 million.

This is the first attempt by attackers to offset the ability of professional blockchain forensics firms and law enforcement agencies to track stolen bitcoins.

While the first Bitcoin transfer by the hackers took place on January 26, 2017, and was reported by Bitfinex via Twitter and by many major news outlets at the time, most of the transfers completed by the hackers in recent days have not been reported.

For example, Bitcoin address 1J5fP2e7o5iUNjniSZmjUx8CPLhmatHXBo received a small portion of the stolen Bitfinex Bitcoin (22.42 BTC) from 5 different addresses during the transfer period on January 26, but on January 30, the hacker transferred these Bitcoins to Bitcoin address 13gpVm1CmuqQcaM4oMhvHYBR78WhZ772WJ .

On the same day, the bitcoins were split into two parts and transferred to two new addresses, where they remained until February 20:

Over the past two days, these bitcoins have been divided into smaller parts and then continued to be dispersed to more and more addresses on the Bitcoin network.

A similar pattern also occurs with the Bitcoin addresses holding the Bitfinex hacker’s funds.

A post published by Bitfinex on Pastebin shows that hackers have transferred the stolen bitcoins to 2,072 different addresses, but the first transfer on January 26 only transferred 876 BTC, which seems to be just a practice run for transferring these stolen bitcoins.

Curiously, the attempts over the past two days coincided with a period when the price of Bitcoin was over $1,100. Notably, these transfer maneuvers occurred during a period when Bitfinex was recently hit by a severe DDoS attack.

Based on the current exchange rate, the lost 120,000 bitcoins are now worth $130 million.