$129.6M taken out in 3 days, $105M of it in a single evening, through accounts warmed up since the spring, and freezes that came too late
A special edition, as they say on the evening news, to tell the inside story of an incredible heist that has been hitting Crรฉdit Mutuel Arkรฉa, one of France's regional mutual banking groups, for several days, and is still going on. For 48 hours the versions have diverged (wildly), and not all the facts are established yet. Still, Zero Bullshit can put a number of facts on the table, and in particular shed light on an attack planned to the minute and prepared over many months.
This article will be updated regularly on the Zero Bullshit website (which now offers augmented, interactive versions of its investigations), which tracks the movement of the funds every hour. Because even though the bank did not have crypto stolen, hundreds of wallets are now sharing a loot of more than โฌ100M.
Euros were changed into digital dollars on accounts opened with crypto exchanges, then scattered. The circuit had been in place since the winter, the accounts warmed up since the spring. Most of the money left in a single evening, on the Sunday of All Saints' Day, a public holiday in France, while it could still have been blocked. Apart from $1.14M blocked overnight from 2 to 3 November, it took until the evening of 4 November, after the bank's statement, for part of it to be frozen at last.