Safety engineer jailed for 3 years for $12M crypto hacks

Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing round $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to 3 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 accordance with prosecutors.

Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the legal professionals representing Ahmed, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

When Ahmed was arrested final 12 months, the authorities described him as “a senior safety engineer for a world expertise firm.” His Linkedin profile mentioned he beforehand labored at Amazon. However he wasn’t working there on the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson advised starcrypto.

Whereas the identify of one among his victims was by no means disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto change, 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 accordance with the press launch.

Ahmed pleaded responsible to having carried out each cyberattacks.

After he hacked Crema, Ahmed contacted the corporate in an try to return the stolen funds, apart from a payment of $1.5 million — a form of unofficial finder’s payment — and a promise that Crema wouldn’t report the assault to the authorities. Crema declined, and Ahmed was ultimately apprehended.

Whereas this kind of deal is uncommon within the cybersecurity world, it has change into normalized within the crypto world. These offers are also known as “white hatting,” regardless that it includes hacking a goal and stealing a sufferer’s funds with out their consent, which is extra akin to what a “black hat” hacker would usually do. Ahmed’s case exhibits that whereas the crypto trade has accepted that this kind of offers are generally the price of doing enterprise, regulation enforcement doesn’t see it the identical approach.

Aside from three years in jail, Ahmed was additionally sentenced to 3 years of supervised launch, and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million “and a big amount of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to the Crypto Alternate and Nirvana within the quantity of over $5 million,” in accordance with the prosecutors’ press launch.