By James Davis
Some of the stolen XRP tokens, estimated to be worth $4.2 million, have been frozen on Binance, the crypto exchange CEO Richard Teng said earlier today.
Teng has promised to continue supporting Ripple in its investigations and efforts to recover the stolen funds. In his X account, the Binance CEO wrote that the exchange’s cybersecurity team was closely monitoring the attacker’s wallets, which still hold most of the stolen tokens, and will freeze them immediately after they reach their Binance account.
“Hacker Didn’t Target User Wallets,” Thomas Silkjaer Says
On Thursday, the head of compliance and analytics at the XRP Ledger Foundation, Thomas Silkjaer, took to X to clarify that the hacker targeted the personal wallets of Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen on Tuesday, not the users’ or company’s wallets. Larsen also confirmed that the attacker only exploited his wallets and said he had already informed law enforcement.
Pseudonymous on-chain sleuth ZachXBT said on Wednesday that the hacker managed to steal over 210 million XRP tokens and laundered some to various exchanges, including MEXC, Gate.io, HitBTC, OKX, Kraken, Binance, and OKX. A few hours after the revelation, XRP dropped below $0.50. However, the token has since crossed above that critical support level to trade at $0.5045 as of this writing.
Chainalysis Notes Increased Recovery Rate
The latest funds recovery mirrors a recent report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis that the rate of money recovery in crypto is increasing, with centralized exchanges playing a big role. According to the company’s report, scammers and hackers have made away with over $24 billion in the past 12 months. Of that figure, $6.9 billion has been recovered.
By comparison, bad actors stole $39 billion in 2022, but only $5.7 billion was retrieved. Surprisingly, some hackers have willingly returned stolen funds to their victims in recent months.
Binance Freezes More Funds
It is worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time Binance is freezing illegal funds. Last October, the exchange froze several accounts linked to terror group Hamas. The police later confirmed that the funds were collected through fundraisers on social media platforms to finance the group’s terror activities.