The Great Crypto Caper: Watch Loopscale Chase Down Millions with a Wink and a Wink 😉

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Well, dear reader, gather ’round, for the tale of Loopscale — that sprightly DeFi protocol — and its weekend escapade involving a suspiciously sticky-fingered hacker who thought he’d cleared out the till. Turns out, our chaps at Loopscale have managed to retrieve nearly half of the pilfered booty, charming the scoundrel with white-hat parlance and who-knows-what promises. 🍸

On the twenty-ninth of April, posted with the flair of a street crier to the platform X (once known as Twitter, but who’s counting?), Loopscale announced the triumphant return of nigh 19,463 Wrapped SOL (WSOL) — the digital equivalent of solid gold coins — valued at a princely $2.88 million. Not a shabby haul for a few days’ work, wouldn’t you say?

The early spoils were generous: a first installment of 10,000 WSOL (around a cool $1.48 million), followed shortly by 4,463 WSOL (about $660,000), not forgetting a prior recovery of 5,000 WSOL (approximately $740,000). A veritable trickle turning into a stream of returned funds. “Our pursuit of an amicable resolution regarding Saturday’s incident continues to make progress,” the cheeky fellows at Loopscale chirped, presumably over their morning tea. ☕️

Crypto chase in progress

Loopscale Puts Out the Welcome Mat with a 10% Bounty — “Come Back Now, Ya Hear?”

On April 27, which was surely no ordinary day, Loopscale’s bright sparks sent a chain-bound message to their delightful thief, offering a 10% reward — a veritable “finder’s fee” — and a get-out-of-jail-free card if they’d only see fit to return 90% of the swag. A generous proposition, if ever there was one!

But let it be known: should the rogue prove stubborn beyond the 24-hour grace period, Loopscale threatened to call in the lads in blue — aka law enforcement — who, as we know, enjoy a good crypto puzzle now and then. At precisely 3:52 pm Eastern Time on April 28, the unexpected happened: a reply! The miscreant expressed a willingness to negotiate, barmy as it sounds. Negotiations over ill-gotten gains? Oh, the times we live in! 🤝

For the uninitiated, the original exploit unfolded on April 26, thanks to a spot of jiggery-pokery with Loopscale’s RateX PT token pricing-switcheroo, lifting about $5.7 million in USDC and 1,200 Solana coins (SOL) from the vaults—like a digital Robin Hood with a palpable taste for vaults, but none of the charity.

Mind you, the cash was scooped from depositors’ vaults only, leaving the poor borrowers and loopers untouched—some small mercy in the crypto jungle.

Recovering stolen loot in DeFi tends to be as rare as a butler who’s forgotten the Earl’s name, but recent times have seen a spate of these miraculous returns — a beacon of hope in the otherwise murky creeks of crypto crime.

Take, for example, Ethereum’s lending protocol Term Finance: on April 27, these chaps managed to claw back a cool $1 million from a misconfigured oracle snafu involving their Treehouse (tETH) market. They recaptured 223 Ether internally and another 333 Ether via negotiation — proof that sometimes, even tricksy hackers have a price. 💸

Crypto loot and law enforcement

As the curtain rises on the first quarter of 2025, the hackers have ripped off more than a whopping $1.6 billion in crypto booty from exchanges and smart contract lockers — PeckShield, the blockchain watchdogs, said so in their April dispatch. The largest single heist? A staggering $1.5 billion swiped from Bybit, thanks to the nefarious Lazarus Group hailing from North Korea, proving once again that the shadowy world of cyber-thievery never sleeps.

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2025-04-29 12:12