A report from the country’s local media surfaced on the web on March 20, stating that the owner of Indian exchange BitCipher Labs filed a complaint against the woman who stole 64 bitcoins. As a result, the Indian Cyber Crime Police arrested and recovered all the stolen funds.
According to the Times of India, a 26-year old Ayushi Jain was previously working for a country’s own exchange Bitcipher Labs which is situated in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India. She had stolen 64 bitcoins which is worth about $430,000 from Bitcipher Labs earlier this year.
Co-founder Ashish Singhal recently discovered that between January 11 and March 11, the large number of bitcoins were transferred through the hardware wallet of the exchange. He then filed a complaint with CID’s cybercrime wing. Ashish Singhal along with two other co-founders, Vimal Sagar Tiwari and Govind Kumar were holding the wallet and private keys on exchange’s behalf.
Police officer, on the other side, stated that the accused had hacked into their systems and carried out unauthorized transactions, and had also added;
“Since a hardware wallet and passphrase was required for bitcoin transactions, it was suspected that the culprit was someone proficient in using this technology, and who was closely associated with the firm. Police prepared a list of former employees of the company and short-listed Ayushi. When questioned, she admitted having carried out the transactions by acquiring the passphrase written on paper,”
As described by police, Ayushi was one of the early members in their team, Ashish trusted her and shared the key to the almirahs wherein the password for the wallet was kept safe.
Taking advantage of this, Ayushi opened the almirahs when no one was around and took a photograph of the passphrase because she required bitcoins to start her own cryptocurrency exchange company. She purchased a hardware wallet and used the passphrase to convert bitcoins with the assistance of Swap-lab exchange to Monero cryptocurrency, and later had them transferred to her Binance account.
Police also said that the woman returned stoled bitcoins to the original owners and they were able to restore it. As for now, a woman is in police custody after confessing to the crime she attempted. Other reports also noted that the police seized Ayushi’s laptop which contained the history’.
In a nutshell, the crypto community believes that India’s apex court decision of removing the banking bank is gradually becoming the wisest decision country has taken. In fact, soon after the supreme court’s move of quashing the RBI’s crypto ban, the crypto industry in India witnessed the largest investment campaigns, initiated by the country’s leading crypto exchanges – CoinDCX and WazirX with Binance crypto exchange.