Nirvana Finance hacker pleads guilty and agrees to pay compensation to victims
Shakeeb Ahmed, a 34-year-old senior security engineer, admitted that he exploited the Nirvana Finance protocol and another unnamed decentralized cryptocurrency exchange, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Thursday.
Ahmed agreed to forfeit $12.3 million he obtained from the two hacks. He will also pay a total of $5 million in restitution to the victims.
“Five months ago, our office announced the first arrest related to a smart contract attack,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “The arrest is now the first conviction for such hacking.”
2 exploits in 2022
Ahmed was indicted on charges of wire fraud and money laundering in July. According to the indictment, he exploited a vulnerability in a smart contract from an unnamed Solana-based exchange that matched Crema Finance’s description.
Weeks after the first hack, Ahmed carried out a $3.6 million attack against Nirvana Finance involving flash loans and exploits discovered in the platform’s smart contracts. Nirvana offered Ahmed a bounty of $600,000 in exchange for the return of the stolen funds, but he instead demanded $1.4 million, and the two sides were unable to reach an agreement.
Ahmed described “sophisticated techniques including token swap transactions, ‘bridging’ the fraud proceeds from the Solana blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain, and using offshore cryptocurrency exchanges to exchange the fraud proceeds into Monero, an anonymized and particularly difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency. The funds were laundered using cryptocurrency mixers such as Samourai Whirlpool, according to the statement.
Ahmed could face up to five years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on March 13.
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