A recent report announced that a 36-years old male suspect has been apprehended by Police officers from the UK’s South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) in Oxford. The man is a suspect in the theft of above €10 million ( $11.4 million) worth of IOTA.



The Hackers Posses as a Genuine Member of the IOTA Foundation



According to a statement released by the Europol, the unidentified suspect allegedly used an IOTA seed generator to gain illegitimate access to various wallets for 6 months after which he transferred their money without their consent.



The hacker who goes by a fictitious name- Norbertvdberg, gained his marks’ trust by posing as a genuine member of the IOTA foundation. He then offered to support users of IOTA by linking them to iotaseed.io which was supposed to generate unique and random 81-digit passcodes which IOTA wallets needed to function.



Knowing fully well that most users would never actually examine the code or know what to look for if perhaps they decide to check it, he then went ahead to create a Github storage which purportedly contained the source code of iotaseed.io. As a matter of fact, iotaseed.io was just creating predictable seeds which secretly logged for 6 months as he waits to predate on potential preys.



On January 19, 2018, after he had accumulated enough seeds, he reportedly logged into the accounts of 85 users and transferred about €10 million worth of IOTA to the account being controlled by him. While carrying out the operation, he created a DDOS diversion for IOTA admins, therefore, making them busy with having to deal with the increased network traffic and not take note of the several suspicious transactions being made.



His actions got noticed when many users started lodging complaints to the Hessen State Police station in Germany which resulted in the launching of an investigation that brought in the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and Europol. The suspect reportedly tried covering his tracks by deleting his available profile on Quora, Github, and Reddit.



First Time for European Police Forces



Notably, this is the first time different members of the European Union forces will be coming together to fight against a cryptocurrency theft case.