Accused of stealing cryptocurrencies, an “ethical hacker” acquitted after the first trial of its kind in France

2023-12-01 20:29:47

A self-proclaimed “ethical hacker” against a cryptocurrency platform. This Friday, the Paris court acquitted a young man accused of stealing from the American finance platform Platypus in February, for damages that the company estimated at $9.5 million in cryptocurrencies.

The prosecution accused Mohamed M., a 22-year-old from Ile-de-France, of having “siphoned off the liquidity pool” of this decentralized finance platform, by relying on a system of flash loans and a security function. “emergency withdrawal” of sums.

“Alert” about “flaws” in the system

At the helm, Mohamed M. described his action on Platypus as his first as an “ethical hacker” to “alert” the platform of a “flaw” in the system.

During the trial at the end of October, the prosecution demanded his sentence to five years of imprisonment, three of which were suspended, with a warrant of committal. The prosecutor considered that this “first cryptocurrencies hacking case tried in France” should “set a precedent”: “the mistake we can have is to think that virtual money takes away gravity,” she said. observed.

The platform “badly coded its contract”

But for the court, Platypus suffered from having poorly coded its contract regulating its loans, the established rules having allowed Mohamed M. to benefit from it, explained the president of the 13th correctional chamber, specializing in cybercrime. “Using an element provided for in the contract (…) may possibly constitute a contractual execution in bad faith”, but not “a maneuver within the meaning of the Penal Code”, she detailed.

By releasing him, justice “did not consider” that he had “behavior as an ethical hacker”, estimated the president, but that he had “used in bad faith the possibility of having this withdrawal” of the sums . The younger brother of Mohamed M., aged 20, was also acquitted of the charge of receiving stolen goods.

“We welcome the good application of the law, and the distinction made between morality and criminal law,” reacted their lawyers Seydi Ba and Théodore Jean-Baptiste. The prosecution tried to “fit our client’s action into boxes, but the criminal offenses did not hold up. This is a deficiency in criminal law, which is always late when we have new developments like cryptocurrencies, they noted.