Ahmed Shakeeb, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million worth of cryptocurrencies, was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the verdict in a press release. According to prosecutors, Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges and stealing around $12 million worth of cryptocurrencies.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the attorneys representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When Ahmed was arrested last year, authorities described him as a “senior security engineer for an international technology company.” His Linkedin profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he was not working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.
While the name of one of his victims was never revealed, Ahmed is said to have hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
Then, weeks later, he hacked into Nirvana Finance. Ahmed stole $9 million and $3.6 million in these two hacks, respectively. In the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds represented “approximately all of the funds that Nirvana owned,” which led to the closure of Nirvana Finance, according to the press release.
Ahmed pleaded guilty to carrying out both cyberattacks.
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After hacking Crema, Ahmed contacted the company and attempted to return the stolen funds, except for a $1.5 million fee – a sort of unofficial finder’s fee – and a promise that Crema would not report the attack to authorities. Crema refused and Ahmed was eventually arrested.
While this type of business is uncommon in the world of cybersecurity, it has become commonplace in the crypto world. These deals are often referred to as “white hatting,” although they involve hacking a target and stealing a victim’s funds without their consent, which is more in line with what a “black hat” hacker would typically do. Ahmed’s case shows that while the crypto industry has accepted that these types of deals sometimes incur a cost of doing business, law enforcement doesn’t see it that way.
Aside from three years in prison, Ahmed was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million “and a significant amount of cryptocurrencies and pay restitution in excess of $5 million to the Crypto Exchange and Nirvana to pay”. to the press release from the public prosecutor’s office.