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Canadian Hacker Charged with $65M Crypto Heist

Coin WorldTuesday, Feb 4, 2025 8:00 am ET

1min read

A Canadian hacker, Andean Medjedovic, has been charged with stealing $65 million from cryptocurrency platforms KyberSwap and Indexed Finance. The U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a five-count criminal indictment against Medjedovic on Feb. 3, accusing him of exploiting automated smart contracts in the protocols between 2021 and 2023.

Medjedovic faces charges of wire fraud, unauthorized damage to a protected computer, attempted Hobbs Act extortion, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering. The charge of unauthorized damage to a protected computer carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, while the other counts carry a potential 20-year sentence.

According to the indictment, Medjedovic allegedly borrowed tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate smart contract calculations, allowing him to withdraw funds at artificial prices and render investors' holdings worthless. He is also accused of laundering the proceeds through swaps, bridging transactions, and crypto mixers, as well as conspiring with others to open accounts at crypto exchanges using false and borrowed identities to obscure the funds' origins.

In November 2023, after executing the KyberSwap exploit and draining roughly $49 million, Medjedovic allegedly attempted to extort the victims. He proposed a settlement in which he would gain control of the KyberSwap protocol and its governing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in exchange for returning half of the stolen assets.

KyberSwap committed to reimbursing affected users in December 2023, offering grants from its treasury equal to the dollar value the user lost when the protocol's liquidity pools were drained. The program became effective on Feb. 1, 2024, with KyberSwap announcing that 1,371 users were refunded on Feb. 3, 2025. The incident also led to the decentralized exchange aggregator cutting its workforce in half later that month.

Medjedovic is also the alleged perpetrator of Indexed Finance's exploit taking place in 2021. Two of the protocol's decentralized indexes were exploited while rebalancing, resulting in losses totaling $16 million. Both protocols have yet to recover their total value locked (TVL) on the protocols following the security breaches.

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