Tracking the BitFinex Heist

View this thread on: d.buzz | hive.blog | peakd.com | ecency.com
·@dooglus·
0.000 HBD
Tracking the BitFinex Heist
Last week, 119,754 BTC worth around $80 million USD were stolen from the BitFinex exchange in what was probably the second biggest Bitcoin theft of all time.

Yesterday their Director of Community Zane Tackett [posted](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4wizdn/txid_and_bitcoin_addresses_connected_to_the/) a [list of the transactions](http://pastebin.com/2XSASEEZ) made by the thief.

I was curious to check whether any of the coins had been spent since the theft, and also wanted to check that the published total was correct. So I made a new Bitcoin Core wallet and imported all the theft addresses as "watchonly". After rescanning the blockchain all the transactions showed up. I was surprised to find that not a single Bitcoin has been spent yet:

![wallet overview](http://i.imgur.com/QaU2Rxb.png)

Here's the wallet sorted by amount, showing the biggest thefts at the top. The thief rather sensibly emptied the biggest accounts first, so we see the biggest thefts at around 2am:

![sorted by amount](http://i.imgur.com/lTEKtkf.png)

And here it is sorted by date, showing the newest transactions first. Notice the top 5 transactions are all tiny. They were likely made by victims of the theft in an attempt to track their coins. Other than those 5 we see the smallest thefts (around 4 BTC each) happening 3 hours later, at 5am. The whole theft took 3 hours to complete, although it is possible that most of that time was spent waiting for confirmations:

![sorted by date](http://i.imgur.com/RtPfQbO.png)

I have made a copy of the wallet [available for download](https://just-dice.com/misc/wallet.dat.bitfinex.bz2) if you want to load it into your own Bitcoin Core client to monitor for future spends. If I see the coins start to move I will make another post about it, and link to it from here.

Edit: I don't know if it matters or not, but I made the wallet using a release candidate of version 0.13 of Bitcoin Core. I wouldn't be totally surprised if the wallet.dat is incompatible with earlier versions of the client.

Edit2: I was asked how I made the 'watchonly' wallet. I put a list of all the addresses I wanted to watch into a file, then did this:

    cat address.txt | while read x; do
        echo $x; bitcoin-cli importaddress $x '' false
    done

The `false` causes the client *not* to rescan the blockchain after adding each address. At the end I did this to cause it to rescan the blockchain:

    bitcoin-cli importaddress $x '' true
👍 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,