A recent investigation has revealed an alleged theft of $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from the United States government. Analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shared data on October 24 about an alleged theft of approximately $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from wallets belonging to the U.S. government.
The unusual onchain activity began at approximately 14:00 PM ET on October 24. During the movement, funds that had not been moved in over eight months were observed being withdrawn from the Aave platform.
“$20M worth of USDC, USDT, aUSDC, and ETH were suspiciously moved from a USG-linked address 0xc9E6E51C7dA9FF1198fdC5b3369EfeDA9b19C34c to an attacker 0x3486eE700CcaF3E2F9C5eC9730a2e916a4740A9f.”
The stolen tokens observed through the platform include approximately almost $14 million in the AUSDC stablecoin; $5,4 million in USDC; $1,1 million in Tether (USDT) and almost half a million in Ethereum (ETH).
“0xc9E received USG seized funds linked to the Bitfinex hacks from 9 separate USG seizure addresses, including 0xE2F699AB099e97Db1CF0b13993c31C7ee42FB2ac, an address named in court documents related to the Bitfinex seizure.”
After making transactions with the stolen tokens, the account began a process to move the funds to various non-custodial applications in order to launder the funds from the theft.
The platform’s experts highlighted that they believe the attacker has already started laundering the proceeds from the token theft. “The funds were moved to wallet 0x348, which started selling the funds for ETH. We believe the attacker has already started laundering the proceeds through suspicious addresses linked to a money laundering service.”
So far, the suspect in the exploit has not been identified by authorities, and it is still unclear how the US government ended up being compromised. It is worth noting that the US government holds over $14 billion in various different cryptocurrencies in its portfolio.