Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing about $12 million in cryptocurrency, was sentenced Friday to three years in prison.
In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of breaking into two cryptocurrency exchanges and stealing about $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.
Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the attorneys representing Ahmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When Ahmed was arrested last year, authorities described him as a “senior security engineer for an international technology company.” His Linkedin profile stated that he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn’t working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.
While the name of one of his victims was never revealed, Ahmed allegedly hacked to Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
Then, weeks later, he broke into Nirvana Finance. Ahmed stole $9 million and $3.6 million in these two hacks, respectively. In the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds “represent approximately all of the funds held by Nirvana,” which led to Nirvana Finance’s closure, according to the press release.
Ahmed pleaded guilty to carrying out both cyber attacks.
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After hacking Crema, Ahmed contacted the company in an attempt to return the stolen funds, in addition to a $1.5 million fee — a kind of unofficial finder’s fee — and a promise that Crema would not report the hack to authorities. Krema refused and Ahmed was eventually arrested.
While this type of deal is unusual in the cybersecurity world, this he’s got become normalized in the crypto world. These deals are often referred to as “white hat” even though it involves hacking into a target and stealing a victim’s funds without their consent, which is more like what a “black hat” hacker would typically do. Ahmed’s case shows that while the crypto industry has accepted that these kinds of deals are sometimes the cost of doing business, law enforcement doesn’t see it the same way.
In addition to three years in prison, Ahmed was also sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million “and a significant amount of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to Crypto Exchange and Nirvana in excess of $5 million,” the release said. type of prosecutors.
