A collective of 50 Russian customers of the non-custodial decentralized wallet – Atomic Wallet – have reportedly launched a class action lawsuit against it after becoming victims of a recent $100 million exploit.
Some believe the North Korean hackers – the Lazarus Group – were responsible for the heist. However, Boris Feldman (who coordinates the victims’ efforts) thinks there might be Ukrainian involvement in the attack.
Working on Recovering Lost Assets
According to recent coverage, the fallen Atomic Wallet users have collaborated with the German lawyer – Max Gutbrod – and the co-founder of Moscow firm Destra Legal – Boris Feldman. The former said they represent around 50 clients who have parted with anything between $150,000 and $2 million. Their overall losses equaled approximately $12 million.
“We are working on recovering the assets for our clients, and we will be filing a class action against Atomic Wallet. They didn’t give our clients any information about the hack or go to the police to report it,” Gutbrod stated.
In addition, Destra Legal has partnered with blockchain analysis experts Match Systems to conduct a separate investigation on behalf of the aforementioned victims.
Initially, the North Korean hacking collective was rumored to stand behind the Atomic Wallet exploit, where bad actors drained approximately $100 million in digital currencies. Feldman, though, has a different opinion, suggesting that Ukrainian hackers could have a hand.
It is worth mentioning that the employment of cryptocurrencies has surged in both Russia and Ukraine after the start of the military conflict in February last year.
“There has been a significant increase in crypto usage since the war. A lot of people left the country and are using cryptocurrencies to transfer and store funds,” Feldman outlined.
The Controversy Around the Exploit
The decentralized crypto wallet (having a user base of more than five million) became a victim of cyber criminals at the beginning of June this year. Numerous customers complained about having their accounts compromised, with some claiming they had lost millions worth of digital assets.
Atomic Wallet was initially not so transparent with its customers, providing an update two weeks after the attack. The team behind the entity said less than 0.1% of its clients have been affected: a statement that not many believed.
One Twitter (X) user claimed he had lost over 1 BTC due to Atomic Wallet’s faults, urging the platform to return his stolen assets.
It is worth mentioning that hackers used the services of the Russian crypto exchange Garantex, sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), to launder the drained funds. Prior to that, they employed 1INCH to exchange the assets for USDT.
According to some sources, the bad actors have also sent millions of stolen XRP tokens to centralized exchanges, such as Binance, Huobi, KuCoin, and others.
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