According to local news reports, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department’s cybercrime unit arrested Yuto Onitsuka and Takuma Sasaki on computer fraud charges. The duo is suspected of stealing worth $711,000 worth of bitcoins from the Tokyo-based crypto exchange CoinExchange.
It was an inside job.
The police arrested 25 years old Yuto and 28 years old Takuma for allegedly stealing 78 million yen worth bitcoins on 23rd January. The bitcoins were stolen on 29th October 2018. According to reports, the stolen bitcoins were remitted to two accounts managed by the suspects in foreign and domestic exchanges. It is also reported that Yuto Onitsuka was an employee of the Tokyo-based exchange at the time of the heist. He had the username and password of the company account.
Cybercrime in crypto space is a concern for authorities.
There has been a rise in cybercrimes in crypto space from the last few years. As reported earlier, $2.8 billion worth of bitcoins tainted with the crime were laundered via crypto exchanges in 2019. According to Chainalysis, more than half of those bitcoins were laundered through the world’s leading crypto exchanges Huobi and Binance. Even though bitcoin provides users with anonymity, but transactions can be deanonymized as the records are permanently published on a public ledger.
