CZ (Changpeng Zhao), the CEO of Binance, has recently shared a story about how different executives of a particular company client were kidnapped and simply forced to empty their whole crypto wallets.
Zhao detailed how the crypto exchange could track the different transactions, freezing more than 94% of the different stolen funds.
Changpeng Zhao Shares Story of How Binance Freezes Stolen Funds:
On Friday, Zhao took to X to share the story, noting that the whole event was very much real. He explained that these executives were actually abducted when they visited Montenegro on a business trip.
Highlighting that they were actually forced to empty their wallets, Zhao mentioned that the executive did undergo an overall loss of around 12.5 million dollars. Zhao also detailed that the company did investigate on-chain activities of the cryptocurrency transactions before reaching out to its partners for freezing the wallet with the stolen funds.
At the time, he revealed how all the funds were taken in USDT (tether) and then transferred to a particular kind of Tron wallet. As per CZ, Binance was able to freeze around 11.88 million dollars or around 9.44% of the total stolen amount worth 12.5 million dollars.
When people asked CZ on X about whether cryptocurrencies are any better than fiat currencies stored in banks and if someone can steal your crypto wallet, Zhao replied, “It’s a balance, and there is no perfect balance point. If you use XMR, then there isn’t much anyone can do (or help you with), as far as I know. Bitcoin can be traced but not frozen until you send it to a CEX [centralized exchange]. The key point is, you have the choice.”
Binance’s Customer Support Wasn’t Quiet Either:
On Saturday, the customer support of Binance took to X to talk about the standard procedure for the exchange for stolen funds that were sent to Binance.
The post said, “Depending on the information provided, Binance may grant a temporary courtesy freeze of any allegedly stolen assets … To keep the stolen assets frozen, you must provide a police report within seven days after contacting Binance Support. Binance may extend the freeze period for you if you need more time to obtain a police report (on a case-by-case basis).”
Only last week, Binance launched a wallet called Web3 that aimed at simply lowering the obstacles for self-custody. The crypto exchange happened to describe its brand-new wallet as a “self-custody crypto wallet built within the Binance app. A user’s private keys are broken into three smaller parts known as key-shares … Two out of the three key-shares are controlled by users, which is intentional as Web3 Wallet is self-custodial.”
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