The Cybercriminals Who Organized a $243 Million Crypto Heist

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The Cybercriminals Who Organized a $243 Million Crypto Heist

A calm honor Veer Chetal, who recently completed the Immaculate High School in Danbury, was about to study at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022 he completed a program “Future Lawyers”, and a story this year on the flawless website showed a photo of a smiling child with glasses with a Tommy Hilfiger Wind Breaker over a red polo.

Classmates remember Chetal as shy and as a fan of cars. “He just thought he was,” says Marco Dias, who made friends with the junior year in Chetal. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this wore for Chetal until he appeared in the middle of his last year when he appeared at school. “He just parked on the property. It was 7:30 a.m. and everyone said what?” Paris says. Cheetal soon rolled up in a BMW and then in a Lamborghiniurus. He started wearing Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on the senior skip day, while Paris and many of his classmates went to a nearby shopping center, Chetal took some friends, including Dias, to New York, to celebrate with a yacht he had rented where they photographed photos with Bashs with Bashs.

Chetal said he earned his money for crypto; Dias says Chetal showed him as evidence on his phone during the classes in the classroom. Once Cheal rented a large house in Stamford, Connecticut, and organized a three -day meeting with friends. “At some point I was in the basement and only played around with my friends, and I only see him on the couch, just like on his cell phone, to avoid pretty much everyone at the party,” says Dias. “And I thought, Oh, that's kind of strange.” Paris remembers that the police stopped Cheetal in his Lamborghini urus because of a traffic violation during a school parade. “He literally called his lawyer on site before answering the police officers as everyone: Wow, this type has, like something for him. This type has serious money.”

Independent investigators say that Chetal was secretly a member of the COM, which is also referred to as a community or community, an online network of chat groups that has roots in the hacking underground of the 1980s and acts as a kind of social network for cybercrime or aspiring functions. In an affidavit from a non -related case, an FBI agent described the COM as “a geographically diverse group of people organized in various subgroups, all of whom coordinate on online communication applications such as discord and telegram to participate in various types of criminal activities”. According to the affidavit of the FBI and the experts who examine the COM, the activities of the various subgroups include swating. This includes that it creates false reports to emergency services or institutions such as schools to trigger a police reaction. SIM swapping when Hacker takes over the phone number of a target, sometimes by cheating customer service representatives; Ransomware attacks using malware that users or organizers refuse to computer files. Cryptocurrency theft; and corporate intrusions.

Allison Nixon, the Chief Research Officer from Unit 221b, a collective of cyber security experts, has followed this growing corner of the Internet since 2011 and is generally considered an outstanding expert for the COM. She says most COM members are young men from western countries. In group chats, many talk about college and lessons in cyber security that they use for their advantage, she says. The gateway for many is through video games such as rune landscape, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto.