“Ethical Hackers” walk out of court free, raising the pertinent question of whether “the code is the code”.
In February of 2023, Mohammed M. and his brother thieved 8.5 million dollars from Platypus (an extension of DeFi), walking out of court with no repercussions.
Mohammed had taken advantage of a coding error and withdrew all assets through an uncollateralized loan. DeFi was forced to suspend services until the culprits were identified.
Crypto investigators paired with the Binance security team to track the stolen funds back to Mohammed and Benamar.
The brothers had been held in custody since February 24th. They both admitted to stealing the funds, claiming to be “Ethical Hackers”.
They argued that stealing the funds brought light to the coding error, and ultimately helped DeFi improve their software. They also told the Paris judicial court that they had intended to return the funds in exchange for 10% of the loot.
Due to this exploit, 7.8 million euro tokens were now inaccessible.
Platypus’ operators and community decided to pursue legal action against the theft.
This situation is ironic.
Cryptocurrency was initially conceived to operate outside the bounds of the law. Since the earliest days of the system, the goal has been to design a currency system accessible to all, which includes both legal and illegal transactions.
Or in other words,
“The code is the code”
Politicians and governments may try to control where assets go and to whom, but these restrictions don’t apply in cryptocurrency.
The process of data collection defies censorship, keeps a permanent record of every transaction, and has its own version of the justice system through its unique consensus mechanism.
The irony lies in Platypus’ pursuit of legal action.
They initially sought a five-year prison sentence. Mohammed faced multiple charges related to the attack and Benamar was charged with receiving stolen goods. Platypus certainly had the right…