The attacker of the $611 million Poly Network exploit has started returning the stolen crypto assets, less than a day after their ID information was reportedly obtained by blockchain security firm Slowmist.
So far they have sent back $1 million in USDC on the Polygon blockchain, with more transactions likely to come.
Seven minutes prior to sending the funds, the hacker created a token called “The hacker is ready to surrender” and sent this token to the designated address. They then sent the USDC in three transactions in incrementally increasing amounts (10, 10,000 and 1 million).
The attacker’s move came less than a day after the initial exploit, which was the largest DeFi hack to date. The stolen assets included $273 million of Ethereum tokens, $253 million in tokens on Binance Smart Chain and $85 million in USDC on the Polygon network. Since then, Tether was the only entity that was swift enough to blacklist the stolen USDT on Ethereum worth about $33 million.
