Australian Woman Steals $450,000 of Ripple (XRP)

In a shocking turn of events that quickly turned into Australia’s first criminal investigation for the theft of cryptocurrency, Katherine Nguyen stole $450,000 worth of XRP by gaining access to the email ID of a man with the same surname as her. As per Micky, August 26, 2019, Ten months ago – when the crime occurred – she hastily converted it into BTC and transferred it to multiple addresses, helping her keep the value more or less intact. 

Prolonged Investigation

Katherine Nguyen appeared in court, showing no remorse and even refusing to apologize to her victim. The crime occurred in January 2018 when XRP was trading near its all-time high of $3, making it all the worse to the victim.

If Nguyen had kept her holdings in XRP, it would’ve been worth a mere $39,000 today; luckily for her, she converted the stoled tokens into BTC immediately.

The detective in charge of the case opined that this kind of case is going to become the norm all over the world. Securing cryptocurrency cannot be done with the flick of the wrist. And while the process is not too troublesome, it is a little more hectic and requires users to invest some time reading about how to go about doing so.

He signed off by saying that personal information is a golden ticket for criminals to infiltrate your financial history and gain access to your bank accounts, cryptocurrency wallets, and other avenues used to hoard value.

Securing Digital Assets

This is a topic that has been covered extensively by multiple sources in the industry. Private key management has long been a detriment to user experience as those who aren’t very good with technology cannot wrap their heads around understanding the concept.

Despite the fact that the actual process involves nothing fancy as wallet providers as well ass your computer do all the encryption and decryption for you, it is still seen as one of the biggest obstacles to mainstream crypto adoption.

Many companies are working on products to help bring users security convenience without compromising on the quality of the security; those involving biometrics trade off a small amount of security for a huge amount of convenience.

For people still confused about security or looking to enhance their knowledge in this specific domain, Jameson Lopp’s wide coverage on Bitcoin security is an absolute must.