Poly Network attacker returns $256 million of the stolen cryptocurrency

The attacker of the $611 million Poly Network exploit has started returning the stolen crypto assets, less than a day after their ID information was reportedly obtained by blockchain security firm Slowmist.  They have now sent back $256 million in tokens out of the haul.

Seven minutes prior to sending the first transaction returning some of the funds, the hacker created a token called "The hacker is ready to surrender" and sent this token to the designated Polygon address.

Then they elected to send back $1 million in USDC on the Polygon blockchain. They did so in three transactions in incrementally increasing amounts (10, 10,000 and 1 million). They also handed back 23.8 BTCB ($1.1 million), a bitcoin-pegged token on Binance Smart Chain, as well as 259.7 billion shiba inu (SHIBA) tokens, worth $2 million, and $600,000 in FEI, a stablecoin. A few hours later, after speaking to the Poly Network team in encoded messages, the hacker sent back nearly all of the assets on Binance Smart Chain. They sent over 1,000 more BTCB ($46.4 million), 26,629 ETH ($86 million) and $119 million in the stablecoin BUSD. The only assets remaining on this chain are 6,613 BNB ($2.6 million).