POLICE in New South Wales have arrested a 23-year-old woman over the alleged theft of more than $450,000 worth of the cryptocurrency ripple.

Detectives from the State Crime Command’s Cybercrime Squad established Strike Force Rostrevor in January to investigate the theft of 100,000 units of ripple from the electronic account of a 56-year-old man.

At the time, the cryptocurrency was trading at about $US3.18. Ripple has lost nearly 90 per cent of its value since its January peak of $US3.39. Today, the 100,000 units are worth about $65,000.

The victim told investigators he believed his email account had been hacked the previous month and was subsequently locked out of his account for two days in mid-January.

When he regained control of the account and checked the activity, he noticed his cryptocurrency account had also been compromised leaving almost a zero balance.

NSW Police said “following extensive investigations”, Strike Force Rostrevor detectives executed a search warrant at a home in Epping at 8am on Thursday.

The woman was arrested and taken to Ryde Police Station, where she was charged with knowingly deal with proceeds of crime.

Police will allege the woman and possibly others took over the man’s email account and locked him out by changing the password and enabled a mobile number as a second authentication on the account.

She then allegedly accessed his cryptocurrency account and transferred more than 100,000 ripple into an exchange based in China, which was later converted into bitcoin.

She was granted strict conditional bail and is due to appear at Burwood Local Court on Monday November 19, 2018.

Cybercrime Squad Commander, Detective Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis, urged the community to enable multi-factor authentication on accounts to help protect from hackers.

“An email account is more valuable than people realise — scammers are increasingly targeting emails as they link the individual to financial accounts and other personal information,” he said in a statement.

“There is often valuable information saved in sent items or the trash, and scammers will look for anything that will assist in taking over your identity or accessing your finances. This is the modern equivalent of digging through a household rubbish bin or stealing mail.

“Just as we were taught to shred documents and lock our mailboxes, the lesson is now ensuring that email accounts containing personal information and are linked to financial accounts have a minimum of two-factor authentication.

“Your personal information is an extremely valuable commodity to criminals and needs be treated and secured as you would cash.”

Police say investigations are continuing.

frank.chung@news.com.au