Two Russians Charged in $5.8 Million Insider Hack of Coins.ph Exchange

The Philippine Department of Justice has charged Vladimir Avdeev and Sergey Yashchuk with stealing approximately 340 million PHP (~$5.8 million) in XRP tokens from the local cryptocurrency exchange Coins.ph.

The two Russian nationals were consultants for the platform operated by BETUR. According to the investigation, they exploited their knowledge of the exchange’s internal network infrastructure and security protocols to gain access to the funds.

Coins.ph confirmed that the breach could only have been executed by insiders.

The incident occurred in October 2023 and was one of the largest in terms of financial damage in the industry for that month. 

Avdeev and Yashchuk transferred 12.2 million XRP, amounting to a total of 340.745 million PHP.

Experts who examined the breach The Block determined that within 30 minutes, the suspects sent 13 batches of 1 million XRP each, along with a batch of 200,000 XRP. For some reason, some transactions were successful.

The funds were subsequently moved to exchanges OKX, WhiteBIT, SimpleSwap, cross-chain protocol OrbitBridge, DEX ChangeNOW, and Fixed Float, among others.

WhiteBIT, at the request of Coins.ph, blocked at least 445,000 tokens.

For violations of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2021, prosecutors charged Avdeev with 23 counts and Yashchuk with three. Bail for each count was set at 120,000 PHP (~$2055).   

According to CoinGecko, the trading volume on the Philippine exchange over the past 24 hours was approximately $9 million. The most liquid pair on the platform is USDT/PHP.

Earlier in May, the meme token launch platform Pump.fun on Solana suffered an insider attack, resulting in a $1.9 million loss.