Breaking: $234 Million Drained From Indian Exchange WazirX, Withdrawals Suspended

One of the leading Indian crypto exchanges WazirX has been drained out of $234 million in a series of suspicious transactions today.

WazirX confirmed the security breach and announced the suspension of withdrawals on the exchange temporarily.

Earlier, blockchain security platform Cyvers Alerts reported that their system detected multiple suspicious transactions involving WazirX’s Safe Multisig wallet on the Ethereum network.

📢 Update: We're aware that one of our multisig wallets has experienced a security breach. Our team is actively investigating the incident. To ensure the safety of your assets, INR and crypto withdrawals will be temporarily paused. Thank you for your patience and understanding.…

— WazirX: India Ka Bitcoin Exchange (@WazirXIndia) July 18, 2024

A total of $234.9M of funds have been moved to a new address. Each transaction’s caller is funded by Tornado Cash, it added.

The suspicious wallet “0x04b2” has already dumped $7.6 million worth of PEPE and swapped GALA and USDT to ETH.

According to Lookonchain data, Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens topped the list of withdrawn funds, with over $100 million taken out. This was followed by $52 million in Ether (ETH), $11 million in Matic (MATIC), and $6 million in Pepe (PEPE). The hacker has already started dumping these assets.

Update:#WazirX has ~$230M in assets stolen. Including:

5.43T $SHIB($102M)
15,298 $ETH($52.5M)
20.5M $MATIC($11.24M)
640.27B $PEPE($7.6M)
5.79M $USDT
135M $GALA($3.5M)
…

‼️Please note that the hacker is selling these assets!https://t.co/1uOozAVeM1 https://t.co/ogtVSFITK9 pic.twitter.com/3vPmxqXwbL

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) July 18, 2024

Web3 Analyst at CryptoQuant Bradley Park told CryptoNews: “This is the SHIB reserve on WazirX. You can see that 5.4T has been taken off the exchange. These assets are likely to be sold for Ethereum at any time.”

As per WazirX’s latest Proof of Reserve report, the total holdings of the exchange were valued at just above $502 million.

The hack is a massive setback to the Indian crypto community which is already under scrutiny from regulators. Indian exchanges are under heavy pressure because of low trading volumes since the implementation of 1% TDS on each transaction. Retail customers are preferring foreign exchanges to avoid paying those taxes.

Earlier, India’s FUI (Financial Intelligence Unit) blocked URLs of several foriegn crypto exchanges including Binance for not complying with local AML policies.