China’s Cybersecurity Agency has accused the US government of orchestrating the theft of about US$13 billion (roughly R$68.7 billion at current exchange rates) in Bitcoin, representing the country’s latest attempt to blame the US for a major cyber attack. The theft of 127,272 Bitcoin tokens from the LuBian mining pool in December 2020 is considered one of the largest cryptocurrency heists in history.
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China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center said the attack was likely a “state-level hacking operation” led by the United States. The agency said the silent, delayed movement of stolen bitcoins suggests unusual criminal activity rather than government action.
The report, released last week, links bitcoins stolen from LuBian, once one of the world’s largest bitcoin mining operations, to tokens seized by the U.S. government.
The US claims these assets are linked to Cheng Ji, chairman of Cambodian conglomerate Prince Group. Chen was indicted by the United States in October on charges of participating in a wire fraud conspiracy and operating a money laundering scheme.
In an indictment filed in New York on Oct. 8, the U.S. government alleged that Chen and his accomplices laundered the illegal proceeds, using them to finance “large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations” including LuBian.
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The complaint states that addresses linked to LuBian “received large amounts of cryptocurrency from sources unrelated to new mining.”
Federal prosecutors in the Chen case declined to comment on when or how they gained control of Bitcoin. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a related civil action to seize 127,271 Bitcoins, making it the largest forfeiture case in US history.
“The U.S. government may have used hacking techniques to steal 127,000 Bitcoins from Mr. Chen Zhi in 2020,” the report said. “This is a classic ‘bad guy eats bad guy’ operation orchestrated by a national hacker organization.”
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The Chinese government has increasingly accused Washington of waging a digital hacking campaign. Earlier this year, the Chinese government claimed that the United States exploited a flaw in Microsoft Exchange servers to attack Chinese companies.
Last month, the Chinese government announced that it had “irrefutable evidence” of a U.S. cyberattack on China’s National Meteorological Administration. But China’s accusations are often broad and lack the forensic detail that is often provided when the United States accuses foreign adversaries of cyberattacks.
On Monday, Chen’s lawyers filed a letter in a US court asking for more time to allow the businessman to track down the bitcoins stolen from Rubian. Attorney Matthew L. Schwartz said in a letter that the government’s claims about Mr. Chen are “grossly misguided.” When the indictment was unsealed last month, prosecutors added that Chen was not in U.S. custody.
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“As we explained in our court filing, we are working closely with crypto experts to track the Bitcoin that the government seized more than a year ago and was stolen in 2020,” Schwartz, president of Boies Schiller Flexner and an attorney with Chen and Prince Group, said in a statement to Bloomberg.
Representatives from the Justice Department and the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.
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