Australian Women Steals almost Half a Million Ripple XRP

In a report published October 25, 2018, police in New South Wales announced the arrest of a woman responsible for stealing more than $450,000 worth of XRP.

Theft Details

The woman was caught after the assembly of a new task force called Strike Force Rostrevor that was established in January to investigate the sudden loss of the victims Ripple tokens.

At the time of the theft, the 100,000 XRP was worth nearly $500,000, but since XRP’s peak, the value has dramatically fallen. That same 100,000, is now only worth around $45,000. Despite the fall, Ripple has become quite a valuable cryptocurrency, making its co-founder the 38th richest person in the world.

Police first checked out his email following the victim’s reports that his email had been hacked after being locked out for a two-day period in January. Upon regaining access to his accounts, he noticed that his XRP account had been nearly emptied.

The tokens had been sent to a Chinese exchange where it was then converted into bitcoin.

After extensive investigations, authorities were able to secure a search warrant for a house in Epping on October 25, 2018, which led to the arrest of the women later granted conditional bail. The women’s court date at Burwood Local Court is November 19, 2018.

Importance of Securing Email

As cryptocurrency becomes more widespread, hackers are becoming more creative in the ways they infiltrate peoples accounts. While it is still important to secure any cryptocurrency-related accounts, securing vectors like email with a strong password is becoming important as well.

Arthur Katosogiannis, cybercrime squad commander and detective superintendent said this regarding the importance of email:

“Just as we were taught to shred documents and lock our mailboxes, the lesson is now ensuring that email accounts containing personal information and are linked to financial accounts have a minimum of two-factor authentication.”

Email is typically used to reset passwords for not only cryptocurrency accounts, but virtually all online services. Thus securing this particular link in anyone’s online identity will pay dividends concerning security.

When storing that kind of amount of cryptocurrency, however, it’s typically recommended that funds be split up into several wallets. To make things even more secure, a hardware wallet could add an additional layer of security.