The Ministry of Justice of the Philippines has filed charges against Vladimir Avdeev and Sergei Yaschuk for stealing about 340 million PHP (~$5.8 million) in XRP tokens from a local crypto exchange Coins.ph .
Two Russian citizens were consultants of the platform managed by BETUR. According to the investigation, they used knowledge of the internal network infrastructure and security protocols of the exchange's online platform to gain access to funds.
In Coins.ph They confirmed that the hacking could only have been carried out by insiders.
The incident occurred in October 2023 and became one of the largest in terms of damage in the industry for that month.
Avdeev and Yaschuk withdrew 12.2 million XRP for a total amount of 340.745 million PHP.
The Block experts who studied the hacking determined that within 30 minutes the suspects sent 13 lots of 1 million XRP, as well as a batch of 200,000 XRP. Some of the transactions went through for some reason.
Further, the funds were transferred to the OKX, WhiteBit, SimpleSwap, OrbitBridge cross-chain protocol, DEX ChangeNOW and Fixed Float exchanges, as well as to a number of other platforms.
Data: The Block.WhiteBit on request Coins.ph blocked at least 445,000 tokens.
For violations of the provisions of the Law on the Prevention of Cybercrime in 2021, prosecutors charged Avdeev with 23 counts, and Yaschuk with three. A deposit of 120,000 PHP (~$2055) is set for each position.
According to CoinGecko, the volume of trading on the Philippine stock exchange in the last 24 hours amounted to about $9 million. The most liquid pair on the platform is USDT/PHP.
Recall that in May, the Pump platform for launching meme tokens was attacked by an insider.fun on Solana. The damage amounted to $1.9 million.