Australia has been one of the most advanced and accepting countries when it comes to cryptocurrency. The first-ever case of cryptocurrency crime has surfaced in Australia where a Sydney woman, Katherine Nguyen became the first-ever resident of Australia to be held responsible and guilty for cryptocurrency fraud.
Epping resident Katherine Nguyen was charged for stealing 100,000 XRP in 2018 in entirely opportunistic crime. She managed to do this by hacking into an email account of a 56-year older man who shared the same last name as her. She had access to the account for 2 days, and the crypto market was at an all-time high during those days when she drained his entire Ripple holdings.
When she committed the crime, the XRP tokens were worth $450,000, and by the time she was charged for the crime, the value had gone all the way down to $64,000. The credit for this massive drop goes to the long decline in XRP’s value. The value has further dropped this year, and the value of the stolen XRP’s is now $39,900.
A long investigation
The cybercrime department launched an investigation in January 2018 and about 10 months were spent tracing and tracking down the digital currency, which in the end led to a Chinese exchange.
Nguyen’s house was raided in Epping in October last year, and the police seized her computer, hard drives, mobile phones, and other documents. Evidence was also found showing that she had converted the XRP to Bitcoin and sent it to multiple electronic wallets.
A detective from the squad said that this could be the beginning of a series of cybercrimes, especially when the people are trying to invest more in cryptocurrencies. The personal information of an individual should be stored securely. Users, as well as the exchanges, should opt for 2-factor authentication to provide more security to the user data.
