Victim Recovers Stolen Crypto by Blacklisting Attacker’s Address”

With the assistance of law enforcement and cyber authorities, a hacking victim who lost 90 Ether was able to blacklist the attacker’s Tether address.

Consequently, they may be able to recover the majority of their funds. The victim, known on X (formerly Twitter) as L3yum, had their funds drained on March 16 after the intruder obtained their hot wallet seed phrase.

Several nonfungible tokens (NFTs) associated with Yuga Labs were stolen, along with some crypto and other NFTs from lesser projects, before being promptly traded or sold.

L3yum announced in an X thread on August 11 that the hacker’s Ethereum-based USDT address had been blacklisted.

“Today, after working with the police and cyber team in my country, I was able to get the stolen funds sitting in USDT frozen and blacklisted.”

At the time of writing, 90 ETH is worth approximately $166,000, and the blacklisted wallet has $107,306 worth of USDT locked up, indicating that the victim may not receive the full value of their stolen assets.

It is currently unknown whether the victim will be compensated. In the past, however, when a USDT address was blacklisted for similar reasons, Tether burned the blacklisted USDT and reissued equal quantities of the asset to the original owner.

It is also important to note that Tether routinely blacklists USDT addresses in response to a court order. When asked if this was the case in the comments, L3yum confirmed that this was the most probable course of action but indicated that it had not yet been confirmed.

This is the part I’m uncertain about, but from what I understand, this is how it works, and prohibited funds are essentially destroyed.

However, my understanding is that this is the case!” he wrote. It is unknown how the hacker gained access to the seed phrase in March.

However, at the time, it was believed that the victim had either been SIM-swapped, inadvertently stored up their seed phrase on iCloud, or was using the wallet on multiple devices.