Binance offers 25 bitcoins in exchange for information about the person who attempted to extort funds from the exchange and now they are even starting an investigation in the matter so let’s find out more about it in the coming altcoin news below.
One week ago, the Malta-based crypto exchange Binance stated that there was an unsuccessful extortion attempt. The blackmailer started distributing know-your-customer images and photos of traders holding their personal IDs in a Telegram chat room. Under the name Guardian M, the blackmailer asserted that the pictures were from the Binance crypto exchange and some other exchanges. One of those publications has been since confirmed with some of the traders that their apparent KYC photos were real. The outlet also confirmed that there was an affected individual in the process but later turned out that the information on the ID was falsified.
It is still unclear how much of the data is authentic and where it comes from. The images could derive from a third-party provider or a phishing campaign that could have ensnared the identities of many individuals. The KYC data dump is not a result of an attempted exchange hack according to the Binance platform. In a new announcement, the exchange issued a ‘’Statement on False KYC Leak’’ where it reveals that an anonymous person was demanding 300 in BTC for withholding 10,000 photos. This is why now Binance offers to pay up to 25 bitcoins in order to find the attacker. The exchange noticed that the data dump didn’t appear to come from binance itself and even had photos that the exchange didn’t put their in-house watermarks in.
What is also very important is that the exchange stated that the KYC images appeared to be from the ‘’same data set’’ which was reported in the cryptocurrency ecosystem earlier this year. The data was reportedly coming from top exchanges such as Binance and Kraken. The Kraken CEO at that time noted that the images lacked the internal watermarks as we read in some of the best cryptocurrency news sites reports:
“This could easily be a ton of phished iCloud/GSuite accounts where people were auto syncing photos from their phones. There are just way too many possible sources of these images if you are looking back eight years.”
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