The United States Department of Justice returned $154 million worth of Bitcoins purportedly stolen from Sony Life Insurance Company Ltd, a SONY subsidiary, in what’s being called a textbook business email compromise (BEC) attack. A BEC is an exploit in which an attacker obtains access to a business email account and imitates the owner’s identity, in order to defraud the company and its employees.
According to the US Department of Justice, a SONY employee allegedly stole funds from the company in May and converted it to more than 3,879 Bitcoins. Those funds were seized by law enforcement on December 1, based on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) probe.
The accused has been identified as Rei Ishii, who allegedly falsified transaction instructions, which caused the funds to be transferred to an account that Ishii controlled at a bank in La Jolla, California. Ishii then quickly converted the funds to Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
FBI was able to trace Bitcoin transfers and identify that 3,879.16 Bitcoins, representing the proceeds of the funds stolen from the company had been transferred to a specific Bitcoin address and then to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet.
“As a result of this coordinated effort from Sony and Citibank, continued to investigate in cooperation with Japan’s National Police Agency, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office, and JPEC (Japan Prosecutors unit on Emerging Crimes), investigators obtained the “...
The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday announced charges against 15 people, including six medical professionals, for allegedly participating in schemes that collectively submitted $2 billion i...