Canadian ‘Pirate’ Stole Millions in Cryptocurrency, U.S. Prosecutors Say

A Canadian man has been charged with stealing $65 million in cryptocurrency from a pair of crypto platforms and also with laundering his illegal gains, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said on Monday.

The defendant, Andean Medjedovic, 22, undertook sophisticated hacks of KyberSwap and Indexed Finance, crypto platforms that developed services on which users exchanged tokens with each other. He stole roughly $49 million and $16 million, according to an indictment unsealed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Medjedovic borrowed hundreds of millions worth of tokens and used them to manipulate prices through a sequence of trades on the exchanges and then extracted the tokens, making a profit and defrauding investors. Key to his scheme, prosecutors say, was exploiting weaknesses in the computer code that set prices on these exchanges.

John Durham, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement that people like Mr. Medjedovic who “take advantage of new technologies to harm investors” would “be held accountable no matter where in the world they carry out their schemes.”

Mr. Medjedovic, who according to the complaint referred to himself as a “pirate” who “may or may not be a criminal” in private exchanges, remains at large.

He has been on the run from the authorities in Canada since 2021, when he was a masters student at the University of Waterloo. That year, he was charged in Ontario for the same Indexed Finance scheme he was just charged with in Brooklyn, a theft he pulled off by using his “formidable mathematical powers,” according to a judge in Canada.