The worst hack in Crypto, probably ever: The Platypus hacker got arrested within 1 week and had no access himself to his hacked funds in the first place.

Crypto surely has a very long history of hacks happening, just last year we were nearly get big hacks happening every week and even some of the biggest ones that caused the near-demise of Cryptos such as Axie Infinity and Harmony ONE. Last week we had a smaller hack of $9M but it was probably the worst and dumbest hack there has ever been.

The DeFI protocol Platypus which is a stablecoin swapper build on the Avalanche blockchain, the hacker used a Flash Loan to get $8.5M out of it and here is a look at the fabulous timeline afterwards:

1. The hacked funds got stuck in the used contract by the hacker because he forgot to implement a withdrawal method to it. That contract was also made non-upgradable.
2. A counter-hack was capable of recovering $2.6M from it.
3. The hacker also had another $400k stuck at a AAVE flash loan contract, which also got recovered.
4. The hacker used a ENS domain, thus ZachXBT on Twitter could trace down the hacker and found out that the ENS domain used for the hack was connected to Twitter and Instagram profiles, called “retlqw“.

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Pictures from the Twitter of ZachXBT

1. The hacker deactivated his accounts after ZachXBT messaged him to negotiate.

2. Just gets better as the hacker was registered on Binance with KYC thus the police could get his real identity and he got arrested in under one week.

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Tweet by Platypus themselves

This really makes it seem like even the most incompetent people are capable of hacking Crypto contracts and then just completely lose it all. Truly fascinating but we should also be thankful of people like ZachXBT exposing those people.