Japanese hacker arrested for stealing $130,000 in cryptocurrency

An 18-year-old boy from Utsunomiya, Japan, faces criminal charges for stealing cryptocurrencies worth $130,000 (about 15 million yen). He attacked the Monappy social media network, a website where users can keep the virtual currency monacoin, between Aug. 14 and Sept. 1 last year and the Monacoin online wallet.

The report quoted him as saying: “I felt like I’d found a trick no one knows and did it as if I were playing a video game.” According to a spokesman for the Tokyo Police Department, the teenager admitted that he was behind the attack.

After detecting the August and September attacks, Monappy revealed that “he took advantage of a weakness in a feature of the website that enables a user to transfer the currency to another user, knowing that the system would malfunction if transfers were repeated over a short period of time.”

The Tokyo Police Department said that this is the first time in Japanese history that someone has faced criminal charges for manipulating hacking incidents related to cryptocurrencies.

Via: japantimes