🚨 Shibarium Hacker’s Blunder: FBI & KuCoin on the Trail! 🎭

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Ah, the theater of crypto! Behold, the noble Shiba Inu’s core development team, in a fit of righteous indignation, doth escalate their response to the Shibarium bridge exploit! Lo and behold, a new on-chain investigation hath mapped the scoundrel’s Tornado Cash laundering trail to the gates of KuCoin. In response to the intrepid sleuth Shima (@MRShimamoto) on the platform X, the wise Kaal Dhairya, a core developer of great repute, did proclaim: “Great work, thou detective of the blockchain! This tale must be amplified. I shall ensure it reaches the FBI, attached to the open investigation report, and beseech KuCoin to cooperate, lest they be seen as accomplices to this farce!” 😂🕵️♂️

A Shibarium Sleuth Unmasks the Villainous Hacker

Mark well, dear reader, the Shibarium bridge was exploited in the fateful month of September, in an attack valued at a princely sum of $2.3-$2.4 million! The miscreant seized a super-majority of validator keys and made off with treasures including ETH, SHIB, and KNINE. The K9 Finance DAO, Shibarium’s liquid-staking partner, did launch a bounty process, starting at a modest 5 ETH, then escalating to a 20 ETH smart-contract offer, and finally to a grand 25 ETH proposal endorsed by the Shiba Inu team itself. Yet, the exploiter, in a fit of pride or folly, did reject this offer. K9 Finance hath since confirmed that the unclaimed ETH in the bounty contract hath been returned to the contributors, with Shib.io receiving back 20 ETH. A tale of greed and missed opportunities, indeed! 🤑💨

In a thread as intricate as a Molière plot, Shima revealed on 1 December that the “Shibarium Bridge hacker foolishly chose not to accept the K9 bounty – it’s finally time to share the investigation we’ve been working on,” detailing months of tracing involving thousands of transactions and 111 wallets. His reconstruction doth show 260 ETH flowing from exploit-linked wallets into Tornado Cash, with 232.49 ETH ultimately reaching KuCoin through 48 deposits into 45 unique KuCoin deposit addresses, which he suspects are operated by money mules rather than the hacker directly. A web of deceit, spun with the finest threads of blockchain! 🕸️🤥

According to his write-up and an accompanying MetaSleuth dashboard, the trail begins with the original exploit address and nine “dumping” wallets. These wallets received the stolen tokens, liquidated them gradually for ETH over roughly a week, and sent a total of 260 ETH into Tornado Cash. Of that amount, 250 ETH entered the mixer’s 10-ETH pool and 10 ETH the 1-ETH pool in a vain attempt to break on-chain linkability between the hack and any later withdrawals. A scheme as transparent as a glass slipper! 👠💎

The critical breakthrough, Shima declares, came about forty days after the exploit. A wallet already tied to the hacker cluster sent exactly 0.0874 ETH to what was intended to be a clean Tornado withdrawal wallet. That minor top-up, he describes as “one stupid mistake” that “completely unravelled their Tornado Cash laundering,” because it established a direct on-chain connection between the exploit side of the graph and a supposedly anonymous post-mixer address. From that contaminated node, he was able to work outward, clustering multiple Tornado withdrawal wallets, intermediaries, and final KuCoin “funnel” wallets. A blunder worthy of a Molière farce! 🤦♂️🤣

Shima reports that each funnel wallet typically routes funds to two KuCoin deposit addresses, creating a final cluster of 45 KuCoin endpoints and roughly two dozen depositors that he argues can be treated as money-mule cash-out accounts. He says the full address list, transaction graph, and methodology were first shared privately with the Shibarium team so they could approach law enforcement and KuCoin while any funds remained within reach. However, he recounts that KuCoin’s fraud desk insisted on receiving a formal law-enforcement case number before acting on the evidence. Bureaucracy, the bane of swift justice! 📜🤷♂️

The official ShibariumNet X account hath now publicly backed the research: “Thanks to @MRShimamoto for doing all the hard work here to compile this thread. We truly appreciate your diligence and methodical approach. Hopefully, this investigation can continue with the help of the proper authorities. The communities need answers.” A call to arms, or rather, a call to keyboards! 💻🗡️

At press time, Shiba Inu (SHIB) traded at $0.00000878. A humble price for a coin with such a dramatic tale! 📉🎭

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2025-12-03 20:24