A hacker returned to the CoinDash company over $26,2 million in Ethereum, money he stole from it since July 2017.
The money was sent back in two installments. The hacker sent her First installment in September last year, returning 10.000 ETH ($ 8,7 million) and second last Friday when he returned another 20,000 ETH ($ 17,45 million).
However, the hacker did not return all the money he had stolen, as he has so far kept another 13.400 ETH ($ 11.7 million) of the 43.400 ETH ($ 37.9 million) that CoinDash believes he stole from her.
The hack occurred on July 17, 2017, three minutes after the start of CoinDash's ICO, a funding campaign aimed at raising CoinDash's Ethereum capital for the main product her, a social platform transactions.
The hacker breached the official websiteσελίδα of the company and replaced the Ethereum address where users could send money to buy CoinDash tokens for CoinDash's official ICO. The company admitted its mistake and eventually gave CoinDash dividends to everyone who sent money to the hacker's address during the hack. At the time and at the then value of Ethereum, the stolen funds amounted to around $7,8 million.
It is unclear what led the hacker to return some of the stolen funds. Some argue that even after restitution of nearly three-quarters of the stolen funds, the rest of the stolen Ethereum is still worth more than the value of the stolen funds when they were originally stolen.
Some experts claimed that the hacker made a mistake by not immediately legitimizing the stolen Ethereum and is now unable to transfer the money because most platforms crypto trading have blacklisted his address (now globally codenamed “FAKE_CoinDash“) and no exchange will help the hacker convert his money to some product or another cold currency, fearing legal action against him.
There are also those who believe that the hack was an internal affair and the "hacker" returned the funds in fear, after the conviction of a bitcoin exchange manager BitFunder) by the US authorities, for lying about the conditions of a corresponding hack.
Others think it's a CoinDash ad trick to get attention, as a new product launches in a few days. Either way, the money was returned to the company, which said it was still working with Israel's cyber-terrorism agency to track down the hacker.