US accuses Canadian math prodigy of $65M crypto scheme

New York feds today unsealed a five-count criminal indictment charging a 22-year-old Canadian math prodigy with exploiting vulnerabilities in two decentralized finance protocols, allegedly using them to fraudulently siphon around $65 million from investors in the platforms.

Prosecutors allege Andean Medjedovic abused automated smart contracts used by the KyberSwap and Indexed Finance protocols to enrich himself. In the case of KyberSwap, where $48.4 million was drained from KyberSwap Elastic liquidity pools in November 2023, it is claimed that Medjedovic borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars in digital tokens, then ran several "deceptive trades" that he "knew would cause the protocols' smart contracts to falsely calculate key variables" before transferring them to a wallet under his control.

Medjedovic allegedly called the exploit a "glitch" and "fake" liquidity. The feds also claim Medjedovic stole $16.5 million from two liquidity pools operated by the Indexed Finance protocol on the Ethereum blockchain ...