IOTA's Crypto Thief Worth IDR 34.9 Billion, This Person Was Immediately Transferred To Prison

IOTA crypto theft case. (Photo; Doc. TechVisibility)

JAKARTA In the crypto world, there is a seed phase or the seed phrase. This is usually used by crypto users who have digital wallets. Seed prise is also known as the seed recovery phase is a string of words used as a recovery key for cryptocurrency wallets.

Seed prise consists of several words taken from a wide dictionary of words, and is set in a certain sequence to generate a unique private key. If users lose access to their crypto wallet account, they can use seed prise to restore access to their accounts on supported cryptocurrency wallets or exchanges.

Therefore, it is very important to ensure that the seed phase is stored safely and unknown to others. Recently, thieves used Seed Phrase to take crypto assets from their owners.

Luckily, the man was arrested by the police after stealing an IOTA token (MIOTA) of more than 2.5 million US dollars (equivalent to Rp34.9 billion) from an suspicious investor. Now the thief is behind bars. The perpetrator of the theft was named Wybo Wiersma, a Dutch resident who lived in England.

He is known to have created a website called iotoseed.io that facilitates the creation of a safe seeded phrase for IOTA crypto owners. However, after five years of investigation, it was discovered that the seeded phrase was not chosen randomly and had been predetermined, making it difficult for users to feel the difficulty when the IOTA was stolen from their account.

More than 100 victims have been identified, some of which have lost savings, business, and inheritance. Wiersma was first arrested in Oxford in January 2019, a year after IOTA was stolen and a number of devices from her property were also confiscated.

According to a Crypto News report, he later admitted that the available evidence was very burdensome and pleaded guilty. At the Oxford Crown Court, Wiersma was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Currently, efforts are underway to recover the stolen IOTA and return it to the rightful owner.

For additional information, IOTA is the first distributed ledger built for "Internet of Everything" (IoT), a network for exchanging values and data between humans and machines. IOTA also published its own cryptocurrency, namely MIOTA.