SpankChain Says Hacker Returned Stolen Crypto Funds

A hacker who stole 165.38 ETH from the SpankChain platform has returned the funds.

The payment platform focused on the adult industry announced Thursday that the hacker, who stole the funds from the platform last weekend, shared the private key for the wallet holding the ETH after speaking to SpankChain CEO Ameen Soleimani on a phone call.

The company published an ethereum transaction indicating its successful recovery of the stolen tokens.

The hacker also helped SpankChain recover the roughly 4,000 BOOTY tokens that were frozen as a result of the attack, which the company then bought, another tweet added.

In turn, SpankChain sent the hacker, whose identity was not disclosed, $5,000 in reward money, $4,000 for the BOOTY tokens and the 5.5 ETH the hacker originally used to execute the attack against the platform.

As the hacker had supplied the 5.5 ETH originally, SpankChain's total monetary cost was $9,000.

The news comes two days after SpankChain originally disclosed the hack, telling its users that the attacker had exploited a bug in its payment channel smart contract, as previously reported by CoinDesk.

While the hack originally occurred last Saturday, the team did not notice the missing funds until the next day due to ongoing work regarding other bugs.

Roughly $9,300 of the ETH stolen belonged to customers, though SpankChain promised to reimburse its users.

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.