Cryptocurrency theft is not an uncommon occurrence, but when it happened to Andrew Schober in 2018, he set about tracking down the culprits. Now he’s found them, and he’s suing their parents to get his money back.
As KrebsonSecurity reports, Schober had accrued 16.4 Bitcoin back in 2018, which was worth roughly $1 million at the time. He lost it through a piece of malware that had been bundled with a cryptocurrency wallet app called Electrum Atom, which he’d downloaded. The malware waits for a cryptocurrency address to be copied on to the system clipboard by a user and then replaces the payment destination when they paste the address.
BleepingComputer put together a video explaining how this clipboard hijacker malware works back in 2018:
With the Bitcoin lost, Schober spent over $10,000 hiring experts in the cryptocurrency field to find out where it had gone. They tracked the Bitcoin through cryptocurrency exchanges to two minors located in the UK. These kids further incriminated themselves after it was discovered one of the them had posted a message on GitHub asking for help accessing a private key a few hours after the theft occurred. The other kid had the malware used to steal the Bitcoin stored in his GitHub repository.
Once identified, Schrober decided to write to their parents explaining what had happened and asking for the 16.4552 BTC to be returned. If it was, “I will drop this matter and move on,” he told them. His request was met with silence, so in May this year a complaint was filed in a Colorado court seeking monetary damages, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and “any and all other further relief to which the Plaintiff may be entitled.” The complaint was directed at the parents, not their children.
The two kids who stole the funds are now old enough to be studying Computer Science at universities in the UK, but now they have a bit more stress beyond their studies to deal with. In response to the lawsuit the parents are arguing that the “three-year statute of limitations applies” and Schrober has run out of time to take action. In response, Schrober’s attorneys point out “That the statute of limitations does not begin to run until the plaintiff knows or has reason to know of both the existence and cause of his injury.” Neither set of parents is arguing that their children didn’t carry out the theft.
It’s unclear who has the higher ground here, and Schrober is asking for a jury trial to take place. If unsuccessful, he’s lost over a million dollars, but if he wins, receiving all the damages demanded will likely hinge on what exactly happened to the Bitcoin these kids stole.
