Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing round $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to a few years in jail.
In a press launch, the U.S. Lawyer for the Southern District of New York introduced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing round $12 million in crypto, in keeping with prosecutors.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the attorneys representing Ahmed, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
When Ahmed was arrested final yr, the authorities described him as “a senior security engineer for a global know-how firm.” His Linkedin profile stated he beforehand labored at Amazon. However he wasn’t working there on the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson instructed information.killnetswitch.
Whereas the identify of certainly one of his victims was by no means disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto alternate, in early July 2022.
Then, weeks later, he hacked into Nirvana Finance. Ahmed stole $9 million and $3.6 million in these two hacks, respectively. Within the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds “represented roughly all of the funds possessed by Nirvana,” which led Nirvana Finance to close down, in keeping with the press launch.
Ahmed pleaded responsible to having carried out each cyberattacks.
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After he hacked Crema, Ahmed contacted the corporate in an try and return the stolen funds, aside from a payment of $1.5 million — a kind of unofficial finder’s payment — and a promise that Crema wouldn’t report the assault to the authorities. Crema declined, and Ahmed was finally apprehended.
Other than three years in jail, Ahmed was additionally sentenced to a few years of supervised launch, and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million “and a major amount of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to the Crypto Trade and Nirvana within the quantity of over $5 million,” in keeping with the prosecutors’ press launch.
