An unnamed Canadian teenager has been arrested in a US$36 million crypto heist that authorities said is the largest-ever bitcoin theft from a single victim, popular bitcoin investor, Josh Jones.
Reports say the heist was unearthed throw joint investigations by Hamilton, Ontario Police, US FBI and US Secret Service Electronic Crimes Taskforce.
The victim was said to have been targeted by a SIM swap attack, which is a cybercrime in which criminals gain control of a victim’s mobile phone so they can thwart two-factor authorization (two-step verification) to execute bogus transactions.
Police say the teen hijacked the victim’s accounts by manipulating cellular network employees to duplicate his phone number through which he intercept the two-factor authorization requests and therefore gained access to his details to exact the criminal transactions.
The teen is said to have used some of the stolen cryptocurrency to purchase an online username that the online gaming community considers rare; and his suspicious transaction then led investigators to uncover the account holder of the username.
Meanwhile, investigations are still ongoing.
