Unusual transactions may be the result of extortion, according to the founder of Primitive Ventures
Last week, the well-known mining pool Ethermine was one of the entities to receive an abnormally high transaction fee of $2.6 million. The company has now decided to distribute the enormous fee among its miners.
Ethereum mining pool Ethermine initially asked the unknown wallet owner to contact them if the transaction had been processed by mistake. In a tweet the pool wrote: “Today our Ethermine ETH pool mined a transaction with a fee of 10,000 ETH. We believe this was an accident. To resolve the issue, the sender should contact us immediately!”
After four days passed without any verifiable claims to the wallet, the mining pool chose to distribute the transaction fee. The company explained: “Given the amount involved, we consider four days sufficient for the sender to get in touch.” Each miner could receive rewards equivalent to about five days of normal mining.
Primitive Ventures co-founder Dovey Wan quickly noted that it was unlikely the unusual transactions were part of a money-laundering scheme. “By the way, this is a dumb way to launder money,” he tweeted. “First you’d need to work with pools to get the funds back into circulation (which exposes them), and such high-profile open transactions are reviewed by the entire community. This is definitely the last thing money launderers want.”
Instead, Wan suggested the activity might be a form of extortion by someone who had gained access to the unknown address. He explained that it appeared the hacker could move the coins — but only to a certain set of addresses that were on a whitelist (or subject to some other unknown restrictions).
Wan believes the hacker could be emptying the wallet to demand ransom. “Therefore, dumping assets could be a way to pressure the exchange side to settle for ransom,” he tweeted.