Part of Stolen Coincheck Funds Traced to Canada

According to BIG Blockchain Intelligence Group Inc., part of the stolen funds of the infamous Coincheck hack of January this year has been traced to Vancouver, Canada, where they are being laundered out.

According to Shone Anstey, president and co-founder of BIG, not only are the funds being laundered out in Vancouver, they are also possibly being sent back to Japan. Anstey refused to give more information on the amount or the final destination in Japan, but assured that the findings will be turned over to law enforcement. He added for Bloomberg, “We felt it was a significant amount that warranted looking into […] They are trying to move it before the door is closed, but there is a lot to move.”

The newspaper of the Japanese Communist Party, Akahata, published a report on Friday, detailing that more than 24 million of the stolen coins ended up in cryptocurrency exchange platform Zaif, which mostly trades in XEM. Coincheck has identified and published 11 addresses where all 523 million of the stolen coins ended up. As Bloomberg explains, “BIG used a combination of public ledger information available to anyone and proprietary knowhow to trace the coins.”

Instead of conducting a hard fork, the NEM.io Foundation developers created a tracking tool that would tag all of the stolen funds as “tainted” with the tag reading, “coincheck_stolen_funds_do_not_accept_trades : owner_of_this_account_is_hacker.”

Of the 11 published addresses, at least four have shown activity in the past two days, transferring more than 31 million XEM. Apparently, several of the transactions carried a cryptic message that read, “This purchase is to determine the bitcoin address of the criminal, insist that the purpose is not for self profit.” in bad Japanese.