KANALCOIN NEWS – An Australian woman named Kathryn Nguyen has been sentenced to two years in prison after stealing Ripple tokens worth US$300,000 or around Rp.4.5 billion, according to reports from local Australian media sites.
Reportedly, Nguyen hacked a crypto account belonging to a 56-year-old man in January 2018. Nguyen apparently did not work alone. The woman from Sydney teamed up with one other person to hack into the man’s crypto account.
The reason is, Nguyen tried to change the two-factor authentication code owned by the man’s account into his own mobile number.
According to a news outlet news website report Information Age, by changing the two-factor authentication code on the man’s crypto account, Nguyen was able to transfer ownership of the victim’s Ripple token (XRP), worth 300 thousand United States dollars at that time.
The 25-year-old woman will later transfer the victim’s token to the China Crypto exchange. Then, Nguyen would convert those funds into bitcoins (BTC) and then transfer them to various crypto wallets.
Several months later, Nguyen was finally arrested. Australian police confiscated several items of evidence, such as computers, cellphones and cash. In August 2019, Nguyen was charged and found guilty. However, only 9 thousand United States dollars (around Rp. 134 billion) were found in Nguyen’s hands by the Chinese authorities.
Nguyen also made history as the first person to be jailed by the police for theft of cryptocurrency in Australia. In addition, the current value of the cryptocurrency stolen by Nguyen is only $30,000 because the price of Ripple has fallen to $0.30 per Ripple.
In fact, when it was stolen from the man, the Ripple token exchange rate reached 2.84 United States dollars per Ripple. Thus, the 100 thousand tokens stolen by Nguyen could be worth nearly 300 thousand United States dollars.
According to the judge handling Nguyen’s case, Judge Chris Craigie, Nguyen was referred to as a person who was “out of character”. In other words, Nguyen is said to only help other people in cases of theft of the cryptocurrency.
“The common thread is the perpetrator’s willingness to help others,” Craigie said as quoted by News Bitcoin.
“It has a different meaning in its willingness to participate and assist in criminal cases,” Craigie continued.
Australian Police have been investigating Nguyen for a year to find out what other crimes he has committed. However, reporting of cryptocurrency crimes in Australia is still considered very low.
According to Ciphertrace through News Bitcoin, losses from cryptocurrency theft, hacking and fraud could reach 1.4 billion United States dollars between January and May 2020. Ciphertrace even predicts that the number will increase to 4.5 billion United States dollars (approximately IDR 66.9 trillion) at the end of the year.
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