Binance has successfully recovered $344,000 worth of Bitcoin that was stolen by scam decentralized finance (DeFi) project Wine Swap. The crypto exchange platform said the recovered digital assets is about 99% of the stolen cryptocurrencies.
In October, Wine Swap raised the stolen funds after launching on the BINANCE Smart Chain. Two hours after securing the funds, the operator disappeared with users’ invested assets.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Binance said that the exit scam was carried out by moving the funds from Wine Swap’s address into a personal address. In total, 19 cryptocurrencies were stolen. Binance noted that the assets were first moved from the Binance Smart Chain to Binance Chain. Thereafter, the scammer moved the funds to Ethereum.
Smaller amounts of the stolen cryptocurrencies were also moved to two other exchanges and Binance Bridge.
Binance added that before its security team could identify the scammer, the fraudster was about to convert all the stolen funds into other cryptocurrencies. Specifically, Binance said the scammer had nearly converted the funds into Binance Coin (BNB), stablecoins, Ether (ETH), and LINK token.
The scammer later returned the funds to Binance after the Binance security team traced and identified the thief. Binance said:
“Analysis of the transfers to and from Wine Swap allowed us to identify which addresses fell victim to the scam and calculate exactly how much was owed to them.”
Binance plans to refund victims of the scam in the coming days.
Image Credits: Pixabay
