NEW YORK – The victims of hacking and swindle who contacted Tornado Cash requesting assistance to recover their stolen funds received little from the help of the developers of the confidentiality tool, three witnesses of the government told the second day of the Roman Storm criminal trial.
A victim, a woman from Georgia born in Taiwan who said that she had lost nearly $ 250,000 due to a erroneous plcs bite scam – with part of the product bleached by Tornado Cash – said her request for help has remained unanswered. Another witness, an Crypto Exchange Bitmart lawyer, who was hacked for nearly $ 200 million in 2021, said that Storm had told his team that there was nothing that he or his developer colleagues could do to recover the funds given by the decentralized nature of the protocol.
A third witness, Andy Ho – CTO and co -founder at Sky Mavis, the blockchain games company behind Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network – detailed how the pirates stole more than $ 625 million in a Ronin Bridge feat in 2022, in fact actually looting the protocol chests. Although Ho himself did not mention it during his testimony, the group behind the feat later turned out to be the Lazare group, the hacking organization sponsored by the state of North Korea, which used tornado money to launder some of the stolen funds.
During their examination of the three witnesses, the prosecutors tried to paint a storm portrait like someone who refused to lift a finger to help hack the victims, or to make changes to the tornado cash protocol to dissuade the future use of the protocol by criminals.
Storm lawyers, when they had the opportunity to oppose the witnesses to the “victim”, to throw the lack of action by their client in a different light: they were, they insinuated, unable to help recover funds, because the tornado money was decentralized. Storm told Bitmart’s lawyer – Joseph Evans, based in New York, a partner of the law firm McDermott, Will and Emery – therefore in an e -mail on December 15, 2021, according to an exhibition presented by the government.
Evans also admitted in a counter -examination that Tornado Cash was not the only place where the hacked funds of Bitmart went after the feat: his business also contacted 1inch, a decentralized exchange aggregator, who told them to return with a mandate, as well as Cloudflare – an important provider of website infrastructure – and Binance. Evans said he had received no response from the last two companies.
Brian Klein, partner of Waymaker LLP and Lawyer of Roman Storm, asked Evans if it was true that the only person who had already responded directly to Evans surveys following Bitmart hacker was the Roman storm.
“That’s right,” said Evans.
Storm lawyers asked Ho, Sky Mavis CTO, a line of similar questions when he was on the stand, although HO – who said he had been assigned to appear by the government and asked to go to New York from his hometown of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, was less to come.
Keri Axel, another partner of Waymaker and member of the Storm defense team, asked HO if he remembered the conclusions presented to Sky Mavistrike after the feat, including that the stolen funds had filtered a certain number of protocols and disintegrated exchanges.
“I don’t remember,” Ho told everyone.
Axel asked how much money stolen could finally be recovered. Ho said $ 6 million had been returned by Norwegian police.
“Did you understand that $ 6 million had been passed through tornado treasures?” Axel asked Ho.
“I don’t have this knowledge,” said Ho.
Read more: legitimate confidentiality tool or dirty laundromat? Lawyers debate the role of the tornado in cash on day 1 of the Roman storm trial
