A Canadian man has been charged with stealing $65 million in cryptocurrency from a pair of crypto platforms and also with laundering his illegal gains, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said on Monday.
The defendant, Andean Medjedovic, 22, undertook sophisticated hacks of KyberSwap and Indexed Finance, crypto platforms that developed services on which users exchanged tokens with each other. He stole roughly $49 million and $16 million, according to an indictment unsealed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York.
Prosecutors say that Mr. Medjedovic borrowed hundreds of millions worth of tokens and used them to manipulate prices through a sequence of trades on the exchanges and then extracted the tokens, making a profit and defrauding investors. Key to his scheme, prosecutors say, was exploiting weaknesses in the computer code that set prices on these exchanges.
John Durham, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement that people like Mr. Medjedovic who “take advantage of new technologies to harm investors” would “be held accountable no matter where in the world they carry out their schemes.”
Mr. Medjedovic, who according to the complaint referred to himself as a “pirate” who “may or may not be a criminal” in private exchanges, remains at large.
He has been on the run from the authorities in Canada since 2021, when he was a masters student at the University of Waterloo. That year, he was charged in Ontario for the same Indexed Finance scheme he was just charged with in Brooklyn, a theft he pulled off by using his “formidable mathematical powers,” according to a judge in Canada.
Cryptocurrencies are digital coins that, unlike dollars, are not overseen by any federal authority and can be traded online through exchanges. Their prices have sharply increased in recent years, with Bitcoin surging to more than $100,000 in December; and the price of President Trump’s own cryptocurrency, $Trump, has also soared.
Crimes involving cryptocurrencies are becoming more commonplace. In September, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., charged two men with stealing $230 million in cryptocurrencies and then going on a spending spree in Los Angeles and Miami. Last month, the founder of a French crypto company was kidnapped and held for ransom before being released.
Mr. Medjedovic, who could not be reached for comment and does not have a lawyer, has previously denied any wrongdoing in his trades. In a 2022 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Mr. Medjedovic argued that his trades were legal, and that he had merely spotted a “mispricing opportunity” in smart contracts, or the code that executed the trades.
According to the complaint, Mr. Medjedovic undertook his KyberSwap scheme beginning in November 2023. After he stole the money, prosecutors said, Mr. Medjedovic offered to return half of it if KyberSwap were to grant him certain controls of the exchange.
“Hackers can at times be painted in a flattering light by pop culture, some admiring their skills and acumen,” James E. Dennehy, assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York field office, said. “They’re stealing money that isn’t theirs, and they’re breaking the laws of this country.”