You probably remember the Coincheck hack which resulted in a complete loss of $500 million. Well, looks like some of these funds have been traced. Surprisingly they were sent to a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, at least that’s what BIG Blockchain Intelligence Group Inc. says.

They claim to know that the stolen NEM coins were converted to other crypto assets and they were sent back to Japan. CO-Founder of the Group, Shone Anstey did not include the name of the exchange, neither the traced down amount or the Japanese location, as those information were handed to the police to help the investigation.

BIG Blockchain Intelligence Group’s Robert Whitaker commented on the discovery:

“NEM (XEM) has a strong and loyal crypto community that has been affected by this hack. Our corporate mandate at BIG Blockchain Intelligence Group is to provide technology and services that bring cryptocurrency mainstream and create security in the sector, which is why we’re stepping up to help bring transparency and insight to this example of illicit activity.”

BIG used a combination of public ledger information available and proprietary know-how to trace the stolen coins. 11 addresses have been identified and published, which were used to receive the 523 million stolen coins. According to the Japanese Communist Party, 24 million coins were sent directly to Japanese NEM exchange called Zaif.

The dev team behind NEM immediately made a tracking tool in order to label the addresses, so exchanges can easily reject if those try to transfer the stolen funds to the trading platforms. The tag reads: “coincheck_stolen_funds_do_not_accept_trades : owner_of_this_account_is_hacker.”

According to Bloomberg at least four addresses have shown activity in the past two days, transferring more than 31 million NEM coins. Some of these transactions even carried a Japanese cryptic message saying: “This purchase is to determine the bitcoin address of the criminal, insist that the purpose is not for self-profit.”