The VeChain (VET) Foundation has put out a public statement that around 1.1B VET tokens were stolen from the team’s buyback address.

A hacker has compromised the VeChain Foundation’s buyback address and 1.1B VET tokens were stolen. All addresses linked to the hacker have been tagged and are being closely monitored. According to the announcement, VeChain has contacted all exchanges to “monitor, blacklist, and freeze any funds coming from the hacker address.”

An investigation is being pursued to determine the method with which the hacker was able to steal these funds. It has emerged that the security breach was likely due to human error. One individual on VeChain’s finance team created an address for the buyback tokens without obeying The Standard Procedure of the Foundation. VeChain claims that its auditing team missed this loophole due to it allegedly being human error and hence had no ability to detect it.

The incident has been reported to law enforcement in Singapore. Thus far, no statement has been made by the authorities and the story is still developing. However, VeChain has said that it has appealed to the whitehat community and vechainstats.com to help with containing this problem.

The ordeal adds yet another embarrassing hack incident in a year that has been full of them. In late November, the South Korean exchange Upbit was compromised which led to almost $50M in stolen ETH funds. The funds are being closely monitored by Binance and others, as BeInCrypto previously reported. However, incidents of hackers compromising team-owned addresses are relatively rare. This makes the VeChain hack all the more surprising.

VeChain was riding high on positive media coverage for some team after the project got a boost from China’s new pro-blockchain policy. With the hack now souring short-term expectations, the team will have to rebuild their hurt reputation to win back investor confidence.

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