Kathmandu. China’s cybersecurity agency has accused the US President Donald Trump-led government of plotting to steal bitcoin worth about $13 billion from China.
The accusations are part of China’s attempt to establish that the US government was behind the massive cyber attack.
The theft of 127,272 Bitcoin tokens from the Lubian Bitcoin mining pool in December 2020 is one of the largest crypto thefts in history so far.
According to China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, the hack is likely a U.S.-led “state-level hacker operation”, which suggests that the quiet and slow exit of stolen bitcoin is not an ordinary criminal behavior but a state-level operation.
According to the Asian Insurance Post, a report published last week linked bitcoin stolen from Lubian to tokens seized by the US government, which the US said was linked to Chen Zhi, chairman of the Cambodian conglomerate Prince Group. Chen was charged by the US in October with involvement in a wire fraud conspiracy and an asset laundering scheme.
In the indictment filed against Chen in New York on Oct. 8, the U.S. alleges that he and other co-conspirators, including Lubian, laundered illicit money by using it to fund “large-scale” crypto mining operations.
Bitcoin is a different type of currency from traditional currency. It is a completely information technology-based and complex kind of currency. When trading with Bitcoin, crypto miners keep track of transactions to prevent the misuse of digital means. They do not allow the same bitcoin to be used in transactions over and over again by monitoring the transaction account.
