Man charged with $65,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency heists was reportedly discovered through chatting on Discord with a company they allegedly stole from

pcgamer.com:

The US Department of Justice has filed charges against an alleged crypto hacker, who it claims stole $65 million in cryptocurrency, starting when he was just 18 years old.

The now 22-year-old Andean Medjedovic faces five charges, linked to an indictment. The focus of these charges is for allegedly «stealing approximately $65 million in cryptocurrency from the KyberSwap and Indexed Finance decentralised finance (DeFi) protocols».

The first hack, in relation to Indexed Finance, involved a systemic vulnerability. Effectively, Indexed Finances managed to cut out many of the middle management fees from trades with built-in regulatory systems, and this reduced overhead partially led to its renown. However, that also appeared to be its fault.

Indexed Finance is monitored with a complex system of checks and balances by adjusting pool prices and liquidity (the cost and size of the digital market that users can purchase) for its crypto funds to incentivise or disincentive users from trading. As pointed out in Bloomberg's investigation of Indexed Finance in 2022, «This model assumed users would interact rationally with the protocol, buying low and selling high».

Medjedovic allegedly exploited this by loaning over $150 million in a 'flash loan' where he borrowed and gave back crypto assets in a single line of programmed transactions. This code would then purchase a vast supply of tokens immediately, artificiality pumping their value, where it would then swap that currency for a different one through an action known as «minting». In this same action, another flash loan would be taken to purchase a different token known as Sushi.

That Sushi token would find its way into the pool of currency, which would navigate around restrictions on the amount of tokens that can be introduced. Sushi would then be traded for the original tokens, which are now undervalued.

This process is claimed by the DoJ to have finished with Medjedovic burning and minting the supply of tokens to trade $4