Chinese police have announced that four former employees of Huobi, a major cryptocurrency exchange, were involved in a significant crypto theft.

Individuals identified as Zhang, Dong, Liu and Zhang Yi planted Trojan horse viruses in wallets, leading to the theft of more than 40,000 user reminder codes and private keys. The specific amount of stolen cryptocurrencies was not disclosed.

The theft occurred before Justin Sun purchased the company. Huobi was once the largest cryptocurrency exchange in China.

According to Ping An Xuhui’s official WeChat account, employees decided to add a backdoor program to a virtual currency wallet software to obtain user private keys in early March 2023. After recording the stolen private keys and the corresponding parsed digital wallet addresses, they destroyed the server and database. They planned to use these private keys two years later to illegally obtain users’ virtual currencies.

Three individuals successfully changed more than 19,000 digital wallet addresses by illegally obtaining more than 27,000 reminder codes and more than 10,000 private keys. In April 2024, the Xuhui District People’s Court sentenced defendants Liu, Zhang A, and Dong to three years in prison and fined 30,000 yuan for illegally obtaining computer information system data.

*This is not investment advice.