A new incident has come into the light which is related to Cryptocurrency theft in Europe. It has been revealed that the European authorities arrested 6 individuals who were reportedly connected with a theft that accounted for a whopping $27 million in value.
Now, these arrests include five men and one woman who were allegedly included in the theft. These arrests took place at the same time after warrants at their homes in the UK and Netherlands.
Apart from the suspects being arrested, the authorities also seized a lot of electronic devices which might have been used in the thefts. These include equipment and other valuable assets too. The authorities believe that these individuals were involved in “committing computer misuse act offenses and to have engaged in money laundering activities”
Now, the arrests were not made all of a sudden as well. It is known that the arrests took place following a joint investigation by UK’s South West Regional Cyber Crime Unit, Dutch police, Europol, Eurojust, as well as UK’s National Crime Agency which went on for 14 months.
It is also known that about 4000 victims from 12 different countries are impacted due to this theft of cryptocurrency from Bitcoin users. Coming to the method used by these people arrested, they committed this theft by using a method called typosquatting. This method is basically when cybercriminals spoof or create an imitation of well-known cryptocurrency exchanges which are basically fake landing pages.
These pages are created so that people get fooled by them and they don’t realize that these are fake ones. Instead, they transact like normal on these websites and their details are gained by the attackers. This means that the access of users’ Bitcoins is gained by the attackers and they get stolen soon after.
The possible suspects were identified back in February 2018 from the Netherlands who have been arrested now.