Triple-A's hacker pushes $12.4 million of ether into Tornado Cash in 56 deposits, 11 weeks after the Singapore payments firm was drained

The attacker who drained Singapore payments firm Triple-A in July has started to cover the trail. On Friday about 4,970 ether, worth about $12.4 million, was sent into Tornado Cash in 56 separate deposits, according to blockchain security firm Salus, whose findings were reported by crypto.news. There were 49 deposits of 100 ether and seven of 10.

Tornado Cash is a mixer, a service used to obscure where coins came from. The funds had been split between two wallets on September 6 and were gathered into one on October 9 before the deposits began, Bloomingbit reported.

Triple-A detected the break-in on July 25. In a post-mortem published in August, it said the attacker deceived a member of its engineering team in a campaign that included impersonation and a live call, then used that access to install malware, reach production databases and order withdrawals with legitimate credentials. Wallets on TRON, Ethereum, Polygon and Arbitrum were hit.

The post-mortem does not put a figure on the loss. Outside estimates put it at about $11.8 million. Triple-A says the wallets held its own assets, that it absorbed the loss from reserves, and that client money sits in separate trust accounts at banks including DBS and Standard Chartered and was not exposed.

It hired Sygnia to investigate and zeroShadow to trace the funds, and notified the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Singapore police. Triple-A cautioned at the time that recovering stolen digital assets is difficult and slow.