"Canadian Hacker's $65M Crypto Heist: 22-Year-Old Faces 90 Years"

Canadian Hacker Charged in $65M Cryptocurrency Platform Thefts

A Canadian national, Andean Medjedovic, has been charged with stealing approximately $65 million from two decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, KyberSwap and Indexed Finance, through a series of sophisticated exploits. The 22-year-old hacker faces a five-count criminal indictment, including charges of wire fraud, unauthorized damage to a protected computer, attempted Hobbs Act extortion, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering.

The indictment, unsealed on February 3, 2025, in the Eastern District of New York, alleges that Medjedovic manipulated smart contracts on both platforms between 2021 and 2023. The attacks resulted in the theft of approximately $16 million from Indexed Finance and $50 million from KyberSwap.

If convicted, Medjedovic faces up to 90 years in prison, with individual counts carrying maximum sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. Prosecutors allege that Medjedovic used deceptive trading tactics to trick the protocols into calculating incorrect financial variables, allowing him to withdraw large amounts of cryptocurrency at artificially generated prices and causing major losses for investors on both platforms.

Following the KyberSwap exploit in November 2023, authorities say Medjedovic attempted to extort the protocol’s developers. He offered to return only half of the stolen digital assets in exchange for full control of the KyberSwap platform and its governing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

Medjedovic has been evading authorities since December 2021, when a Canadian court issued a warrant for his arrest. In a 2023 interview with a DeFi Llama reporter, he described life as a fugitive as “exhausting” and revealed he had been moving between locations in Europe, South America, and an unnamed island nation.

The case has involved international cooperation, with assistance from the Netherlands’ Public Prosecution Service and Cybercrime Unit, as well as U.S. Customs and Border Protection. According to a spokesperson for the Eastern District of New York, Medjedovic remains at large and is not believed to be in the United States.

U.S. Attorney John J. Durham emphasized the sophisticated nature of the attacks,