Security engineer jailed for 3 years for $12M crypto hacks
Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison.
In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.
When Ahmed was arrested last year, the authorities described him as “a senior security engineer for an international technology company.” His LinkedIn profile said he previously worked at Amazon. But he wasn’t working there at the time of his arrest, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.
While the name of one of his victims was never disclosed, Ahmed reportedly hacked into Crema Finance, a Solana-based crypto exchange, in early July 2022.
Then, weeks later, he hacked into Nirvana Finance. Ahmed stole $9 million and $3.6 million in those two hacks, respectively. In the case of Nirvana Finance, the stolen funds “represented approximately all the funds possessed by Nirvana,” which led Nirvana Finance to shut down, according to the press release.
