Sept 25 (Reuters) – Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget said that crypto worth roughly $350 million had been stolen from the platform, underscoring the industry’s vulnerability to hackers.
Last year, attackers stole $2.9 billion worth of crypto across nearly 150 different attacks, according to researchers at TRM Labs.
Authorities warned in July that organised crime groups use crypto to quickly transfer funds across borders without using the mainstream financial system.
Here are some of the biggest thefts since bitcoin was born in 2008.
BYBIT
A record $1.5 billion worth of the cryptocurrency ether was stolen from the exchange Bybit in February 2025, in what researchers said was the largest crypto theft so far.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said North Korea was responsible and that the funds were quickly converted into other cryptocurrencies then dispersed across thousands of addresses on multiple blockchains.
North Korea has denied organising crypto heists.
POLY NETWORK
Hackers stole around $610 million in August 2021 from Poly Network, a platform that facilitates peer-to-peer token transactions. The hackers behind the heist later returned nearly all of the stolen funds.
The hack highlighted vulnerabilities in the burgeoning decentralised finance — DeFi — sector, where users lend, borrow and save in digital tokens, bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of finance such as banks and exchanges.
RONIN NETWORK
Hackers in March 2022 stole cryptocurrency worth around $540 million at the time from a blockchain project linked to the popular online game Axie Infinity.
Ronin, a network that allows the transfer of crypto coins across different blockchains, said that hackers stole some 173,600 ether tokens and 25.5 million USD Coin tokens.
COINCHECK
In January 2018, hackers stole cryptocurrency then worth around $530 million from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck. The thieves attacked one of Coincheck’s “hot wallet” — a digital folder stored online — to drain the funds, drawing attention to security at exchanges.
South Korea’s intelligence agency said at the time that a North Korean hacking group may have been behind the heist.
MT. GOX
In one of the earliest and most high-profile crypto hacks, bitcoin worth close to $500 million was stolen from the Mt.Gox exchange in Tokyo, then the world’s biggest, between 2011 and 2014.
Mt.Gox, which once handled 80% of the world’s bitcoin trade, filed for bankruptcy in early 2014 after the hack was revealed, with some 24,000 customers losing access to their funds.
(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Tom Wilson in London, and Elizabeth Howcroft in Paris; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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