Crédit Mutuel Arkéa: the French bank victim of massive hacking, funds stolen

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https://cryptoast.fr/credit-mutuel-arkea-hack-crypto-133-millions-zachxbt/

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa would be the victim of a fraud of at least $133 million, revealed by on-chain investigator ZachXBT on November 4. But contrary to initial information, these are not cryptocurrencies that were directly stolen from the bank.

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According to journalist Grégory Raymond, who claims to have investigated the case the day before, the hackers first misappropriated funds in traditional currency before transferring them to several crypto platforms, notably Crypto.com.

“This is not crypto that was stolen directly from the bank. It is fiat that would have been taken out, then changed into cryptos to allow laundering,” a source close to the matter explained to him.

The latter evokes an organized network relying on numerous “mule” accounts, intermediaries responsible for receiving and transferring the embezzled money.

For its part, ZachXBT had initially identified, on November 2, more than $106 million in suspicious withdrawals of USDC and USDT stablecoins from several exchange platforms. He later raised his estimate to $133 million after discovering an additional $27 million withdrawals.

The investigator suspects that the losses could be even greater when taking into account over-the-counter (OTC) transactions.

Contacted by Cryptoast, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa had not responded at the time of writing these lines.

The alleged hacker would have quickly sought to disperse the funds. According to blockchain analytics firm Bitquery, $62.98 million in stablecoins were converted into 27,553 Ether (ETH) in just four hours, via UniswapX, Uniswap's decentralized exchange service.

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Bitquery traced withdrawals from Kraken, Crypto.com and OKX. Kraken claims to have restricted accounts linked to the incident, while Crypto.com blocked associated funds. Both platforms assure that their security has not been compromised.

ZachXBT also describes transfers to instant exchange services like WellWallet and Kyrrex, conversions to Monero (XMR), a cryptocurrency designed to hide transactions, and movements between multiple blockchains.

Machine-translated from French