A former employee of the now-defunct New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia has pled guilty to charges of stealing $245,000 (US$171,969) in crypto.
A district court has afforded an interim name suppression to the ex-employee who admitted to two charges including theft by a person in a special relationship and theft over $1,000, local news outlet Stuff reported Monday.
During his time at the exchange, the unnamed employee created copies of Cryptopia’s private keys, saving them to a USB storage drive before taking it home and uploading the data to his personal computer.
At its height, the New Zealand-based exchange, now in liquidation following a disastrous hack in 2019, employed more than 80 staff while servicing 1.4 million customers globally.
Following the hack, all customer accounts, totaling more than $100 million in today’s prices, were frozen after more than $17 million in ether and other crypto were stolen. Liquidation proceedings were then established in an attempt to recover affected former users of the exchange.
