The culprits allegedly behind the EtherDelta 2017 hack have been formally indicted by the US Attorney’s Office, according to court documents filed last month. Elliott Gunton, aka “Planet,” and Anthony Tyler Nashatka, aka “Psycho,” face fraud charges that could result in years of jail time and millions of dollars in fines for stealing at least $800,000 of cryptocurrency from the Ethereum-based cryptocurrency exchange.
In December 2017, the hackers “sim-jacked” an EtherDelta employee, believed to be CEO Zachary Coburn, by stealing his phone number to get into his emails and then accessing EtherDelta’s DNS account. The hackers redirected any users heading to the site to a fake clone they had made of EtherDelta. Here, unsuspecting users entered details of their cryptocurrency wallets, which the hackers then used to drain their funds.
The $800,000 mentioned in the court documents is just the theft from one user’s account; the total figure could be much higher.
One of the hackers, Gunton, aged 20, who also goes by “Glubz”, also hacked telco provider TalkTalk. He was sentenced to prison for 20 months last year after police, checking up on a sexual harm prevention order, seized a computer showing he had over $300,000 worth of Bitcoin in his account.
“Having a lot of money is cool... but having a lot of money without people knowing is cooler,” Gunton tweeted back in May. Gunton has already been forced to pay back over half a million dollars.