Victim of 90 ETH exploit set to claw funds back after hacker was blacklisted

cointelegraph.com:

With the help of police and cyber authorities, a victim of a hack worth 90 Ether (ETH) has gotten the attacker’s Tether (USDT) address blacklisted. As a result, they may be able to get most of their funds back.

[2023/08/11 17:30] USDT blacklisted 0x788bc56b67c289399cd6e2022f0d76484f04724a in block 17893148 https://t.co/WipjkHXFGp

The victim, who goes by @l3yum on X (Twitter), was initially drained on March 16 after the hacker managed to get a hold of their hot wallet seed phrase. Several Yuga Labs-related NFTs were stolen, alongside some crypto and other NFTs from smaller projects, and then promptly swapped or sold off.

In an Aug. 11 X thread, L3yum highlighted that the hacker’s Ethereum-based USDT address had been blacklisted, as he noted that: “Today after working with the police and cyber team in my country, I was able to get the stolen funds sitting in USDT frozen and black listed.”

The people I was working with were amazing The original police officer I dealt with didn’t even know anything about crypto aside from hearing of it, but after a few phone calls just by the way he was talking I knew he was learning and actually cared Very grateful

At the time of writing, 90 ETH is equivalent to roughly $166,000 and the blacklisted wallet has $107,306 worth of USDT locked up in it, suggesting the victim may not get the full value of their stolen funds back.

While it is also not yet 100% certain if the victim will be reimbursed, in previous instances in which a USDT address has been blacklisted under similar circumstances, Tether has burned the blacklisted USDT and re-issued equal amounts of the asset to the original owner.

It is also worth noting that the blacklisting of a USDT address by Tether generally comes after a court