Security Engineer Jailed For 3 Years For $12M Crypto Hacks (techcrunch.com) 8
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the lawyers representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When Ahmed was arrested last year, the authorities described him as "a senior security engineer for an international technology company." His LinkedIn profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn't working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the lawyers representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When Ahmed was arrested last year, the authorities described him as "a senior security engineer for an international technology company." His LinkedIn profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn't working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
Pretty good return on investment (Score:3)
Assuming the money is still locked up somewhere (no pun intended) that's a return of $4 million per year
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure whether he actually has all he stole +$5M, or if this constitutes a financial death sentence.
Re: (Score:2)
Story of Toni Musilin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Got hired as security van driver and works there for 10 years. One day, he drives 11.6 million worth of new Euro banknotes from the central bank to a distribution centre. This is before the serial numbers are written down. As he was alone for moments, he drives away. Most of the heist is later recovered in a rented garage box. He claims he left all of it in the van (the rest must have been taken by some other thieves).
With no violence, weapons or crime
One more time for the dense out there (Score:3)
If you are going to steal a lot of money, leave the country the moment the cash is in your hand. Don't hang around pretending everything is fine and no one is going to discover your theft...leave. Now.
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Leave to where? You'll get extradited in most places. Places that don't do extradition are not nice places to live for criminals, sometimes not even for non-criminals. Leaving the country will automatically get you removed from the "might know something" list and put on the "definitely the priority suspect" list.
Best advice for would be thieves, is don't do it. Other advice is usually irrelevant as most people dumb enough to do the crimes are less likely to follow advice or think things through.
Once you
Re:One more time for the dense out there (Score:4)
If you are going to steal a lot of money, leave the country the moment the cash is in your hand. Don't hang around pretending everything is fine and no one is going to discover your theft...leave. Now.
Leave to where? You still an amount large enough, and there's no place on Earth sans some dictatorial hellholes where you can hide.
Consider that Butch Cassidy was hunted down all the way to Bolivia back in the day, before Interpol and networked information sharing services.
It's like sometimes we see two-time criminals fleeing to Mexico and then get all surprised to find that a) there's police in Mexico, and b) that they have computers and shit, and c) that their USA counterparts forwarded them arrests warrants for their asses.
The days of leaving a country and hiding were gone already long time ago.
Crypto exchange? (Score:2)