After $16 Billion Crypto Platform Hacking, 18YO Math Prodigy Says 'Won't Return Funds'

It was on October 14th 2021 in England, when crypto platform Indexed Finance was hacked by a then 18-year-old math prodigy.

Indexed Finance was built on the Ethereum blockchain, a public ledger where transaction details are stored, which meant there was a record of the attack.

It appeared that the platform had been fooled into severely undervaluing tokens that belonged to its users and selling them to the attacker at an extreme discount. Altogether, the hacker had run off with $16 million worth of assets, as per a Bloomberg report.

How The Hacker Was Identified

After realizing that he hadn't heard back from one particular collaborator, Indexed Finance¡¯s contributor Laurence Day searched his chat.

Weeks earlier, a coder going by the username ¡°UmbralUpsilon¡±had reached out to Day and Kellar on Discord, offering to create a bot that would make their platform more efficient.

On checking the chat, Laurence found out that the coder had deleted his messages and changed his username!

After taking numerous steps like pulling up the participant's registration, getting his profile on the coding platform GitHub which was created by someone whose email address began with ¡°amedjedo¡±, to finding that there was a Wikipedia contributor with a username similar to the one on GitHub, the quest finally lead to finding that it was 18-year-old Andean Medjedovic, a notable mathematician who did it all.

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When Indexed went live in 2020, Medjedovic, who goes by Andy, had just started working on his master's degree. 18-year-old Medjedovic had until recently been a master's student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, specializing in mathematics. His r¨¦sum¨¦ said he had an interest in cryptocurrency.

He had cruised through his bachelor's in three years at Waterloo, one of Canada's top schools for math and computer science and the alma mater of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Medjedovic had presented his master's thesis on random matrix theory and was last year planning to apply to Ph.D. programs. ¡°I can't think of any other student in my time here who has gotten that degree that early,¡± says David Jao, a professor of mathematics at Waterloo.

Despite multiple attempts by the crypto platform, the prodigy has repeatedly joked about their ¡®rewards¡¯ and refused to return the funds.

Also Read: Co-Creator Of Elon Musk's Favorite Dogecoin Calls 95% of All Crypto Projects 'Scam and Garbage'

The Company¡¯s Attempts To Recover Funds

Even though Laurence Day had already contacted the math prodigy to offer a 10% reward for the tokens' safe return, striking a note of grudging praise¡ª¡°well played,¡± he wrote¡ªbut hadn't heard back.

So Kellar tried a different tactic, messaging Medjedovic and addressing him as ¡°Andean.¡±

This time 18-year-old Medjedovic reacted, taunting Indexed users publicly on Twitter: ¡°You were out-traded. There is nothing you can do about that.?¡­?Such is crypto.¡±

When a team member emailed him independently, saying that if he returned the tokens they'd pay him $50,000, Medjedovic responded with a link to an Ethereum address. ¡°Send the money over,¡± he wrote, as per the Bloomberg report.

Finally, Kellar texted Medjedovic to make one last plea before, he said, they would be forced to bring in lawyers and police. ¡°I implore you to give up now and make this easy on yourself,¡± he wrote. The teenager responded with ¡°Xdxdxd,¡± an emoticon that evokes dying of laughter, and added, ¡°Best of luck.¡±

On Twitter, co-founder Kellar had apologized to Indexed's hundreds of users and took responsibility for the vulnerability he'd failed to detect. ¡°I f---ed up,¡± he wrote.

Now, it remains to be seen what this math prodigy goes on to do regarding this crypto platform hacking. But the way things have gone by in the past few months, it doesn't seem that the prodigy has any intention of returning back the billions of dollars, not even in exchange for the reward fee offered by the platform!

Also Read: 24YO Woman Loses $300,000 Inheritance Money After Falling For A Crypto Romance Scam On A Dating App

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