A Canadian citizen has been charged by US authorities for allegedly stealing about $65 million from two decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.
The Justice Department claims that Andean Medjedovic carried out separate attacks on Indexed Finance and KyberSwap, using deceptive trading methods to take funds and then attempting to hide them through various transactions.
On February 3, a federal court in New York unsealed an indictment against Medjedovic, accusing him of hacking, fraud, money laundering, and attempted extortion. He is not in custody, and officials say he is still at large.
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Prosecutors say that in October 2021, he took $16.5 million from Indexed Finance by manipulating liquidity pools. In November 2023, a similar approach allegedly allowed him to withdraw $48.8 million from KyberSwap.
The court documents state that Medjedovic borrowed "hundreds of millions of dollars in digital tokens" and used them in trades that misled the protocols’ smart contracts.
After the KyberSwap attack, authorities say he attempted to pressure the victims into a deal. According to the indictment, he sent blockchain messages suggesting he would delay negotiations about returning funds. He later proposed a deal where he would give back only half of what he had taken in exchange for control over part of the platform.
Authorities also claim he moved the stolen funds through a crypto mixing service and various blockchain bridges. When a bridging service froze some of the funds, Medjedovic allegedly paid $85,000 to an undercover agent—who he believed was a software developer—to unlock the money.
Meanwhile, Anurag Pramod Murarka, an Indian citizen, was recently sentenced to over 10 years in a US prison. What happened? Read the full story.
