The hackers who committed the theft of $550 million worth of NEM tokens, from Japanese crypto exchange Coincheck, are probably finished cashing out completely according to a Nikkei report. The Tokyo based cybersecurity firm L Plus has been recording and analyzing the transactions which were related to the stolen NEM and now claim that nearly all of the funds were already laundered through dark web channels.

After identifying a dark web portal that was selling a lot of the stolen NEM funds for other cryptocurrencies, they found out that the hacker’s available balance was showing zero, meaning all the NEM tokens have already been exchanged (which was a hefty sum). Now these are distributed through possibly thousands of exchanges and wallets across the globe. This makes it nearly impossible to solve the issue despite the efforts made by the local police. Reportedly 100 police officers from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department were assigned to look into the theft.

As we have reported previously, there were positive signs when some of the funds got successfully located in a Canadian exchange, but the hackers probably turned towards the dark web after they saw the amount of resources that law enforcement and blockchain analytics companies mobilized versus them. Nevertheless the Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck has kept its promise to refund the clients who got affected by the incident.