Official statement from the Polkacipher team with respect to recent hack incident.
In the light of yesterday’s event about Polkacipher ($CPHR) token being drained of its trading liquidity on PancakeSwap and $CPHR tokens from all its official addresses to below address.
0x875E76809a91292D95Dd7CA24F455905a9157bD2
Per our internal investigation and with the help of local authorities, we have found that this hack and several unauthorized transactions over past 48 hours were executed as an act of personal vendetta by our ex-employee and blockchain developer (Shubhang Mukesh Jain) who was recently fired from the company for behavioural issues and on the count of cheating, theft and breach of trust.
How it happened?
As we were transitioning to newer infrastructure and moving funds from the previous wallets to newer wallets, he with help of his parents during the handover phase, managed to steal one of the confiscated laptops which had backups of the deployer addresses and other official address which held $CPHR tokens. To have a last hand at the disposable tokens that were in the official addresses, Shubhang and his parents tried to break and enter office in an attempt to destroy previously owned devices to obstruct the internal investigation upon being unsuccessful at his unethical act, he then attempted an assault on Akhil Gupta(CEO) and his family on the 13th April 2022 as a measure of desperate step to distract and obstruct our migration to buy time until yesterday i.e 23rd April 2022 which marked the end of vesting period for our investors and backers and liquidated whatever he stole.
While we were under impression that he doesn’t hold any of the company assets and Akhil out of the city to secure his family, he found necessary time to act on his personal vendetta to liquidate the tokens which was stolen yesterday. Local authorities were informed and have been searching his whereabouts. His accomplices, his parents and Shubhang are still at large at the moment, and currently active through the wallet to squeeze more funds by selling to unsuspectful supporters who are trading $CPHR.
Do not trade $CPHR
We urge you not to trade $CPHR on PancakeSwap & Gate.io. Armed with this latest information we encourage everyone to not react to the FUD at this moment. So far Shubhang has transferred the ownership of the token contract to the new address where all the tokens were moved, and increased the slippage to maximum hence disabling all the holders to sell their tokens. So far he has also managed to liquidate a total of 630 BNB(~$252,000) and 592,324,638 $CPHR valued at approximately $2.3M USD at the time of the exploit.
An official complaint has been filed with the local authorities against all of them, It was also found that Shubhang Mukesh Jain employed numerous scamming techniques to steal funds from various other sources whose information was retrieved through his devices, currently under custody of authorities. He also deployed multiple fictitious identities to set up online accounts with support of his parents, as an attempt to obfuscate transaction history of stolen funds and later mostly deposited at below Binance address:
0xee0141bbc5812fbff33465a8bf4c11ccfb9ee64c
We will update everyone on the newer developments regarding this situation as soon as we are able to publish newer information publicly. For now, your patience is deeply is appreciated and as for the questions being asked to us via community members and other concerned parties, team is not backing away from the responsibilities vested to us at Polkacipher and towards the community, but current ongoing developments and associated activities will be at halt until this situation is resolved. We will update the community as early as possible on the next steps.
About PolkaCipher
PolkaCipher is a next-level privacy-preserving oracle network on the Polkadot Blockchain focused on bringing the use case of private NFTs to off-chain businesses and being a bridge for seamless integration to on-chain Defi apps.
PolkaCipher’s unique offerings help push the use-case of the NFTs in real-world scenarios while still being connected to a cross-chain network that is fair and accurate. PolkaCipher intends to achieve business goals by helping users transact privately and securely using NFTs as a mode of access to different decentralized apps (Dapps) and real-world business rewards.
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