A Canadian man has been charged for a raft of cryptocurrency hacking offenses that totaled $65 million.
Andean Medjedovic is at the center of the five-count criminal indictment unsealed in New York.
The federal court charged him with exposing and taking advantage of vulnerabilities in two decentralized finance protocols, which led to the protocols’s investors being $65 million lighter.
Trial Attorney Tian Huang of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas Axelrod and Andrew Reich for the Eastern District of New York prosecuted the Medjedovic case.
Huang, in addition to providing in his role for the Criminal Division, is also a member of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET).
Canadian man charged with crypto hacking
The court alleged that from 2021 to 2023, Medjedovic preyed on automated smart contracts used by KyberSwap and Indexed Finance decentralized finance protocols.
He then racked up loans totaling “millions of dollars in digital tokens, which he used to engage in deceptive trading that he knew would cause the protocols’ smart contracts to falsely calculate key variables. Through his deceptive trades, Medjedovic was able to, and ultimately did, withdraw millions of dollars of investor funds from the protocols at artificial prices, rendering the victims’ investments essentially worthless.”
Medjedovic, according to the Justice Department, allegedly hid the finer points of the cryptocurrency fraud through a series of hacking money laundering techniques.
These included using a “mixer” which shuffles illicit transactions in with several other cryptocurrency traffic. He is also accused of using swap and bridging transactions in addition to the mixer to process and wash the funds taken
“With others, Medjedovic also allegedly schemed to open accounts with digital assets exchanges using false and borrowed identifying information to conceal the source and true ownership of the proceeds,” said the court report.
The Canadian faces ten years on the charge of unauthorized damage to a protected computer count. He also faces twenty years in prison for each count of attempting to circumvent the Hobbs Act, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering.
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