In the wake of another crypto theft, Andre Schober who was defrauded of 16.4 Bitcoin in 2018, has investigated and found out the perpetrators, now he’s suing their parents for a refund.
Although cryptocurrency theft is not uncommon, when it happened to Andrew Schober in 2018, he went out to find the perpetrators. Now that he’s found them, he’s suing their parents to reclaim his funds.
According to KrebsonSecurity, Schober possessed 16.4 Bitcoin in 2018, which was worth almost $1 million at the time.
He’d lost it due to malware that came packaged with a cryptocurrency wallet app called Electrum Atom that he’d downloaded.
When a user copies a cryptocurrency address to the system clipboard, the malware replaces the payment destination with the address when they paste it.
Schober spent over $10,000 to hire professionals in the cryptocurrency area to figure out where Bitcoin had gone.
They traced Bitcoin to two juveniles in the United Kingdom using cryptocurrency exchanges. These students were further incriminated when it was discovered that one of them had written a message on GitHub a few hours after the theft asking for help accessing a private key. The malware used to steal the Bitcoin was stored in the other kid’s GitHub repository.
Schrober decided to write to their parents after being recognized, stating what had transpired and requesting the return of the 16.4552 BTC.
If it was, he informed them, “I will drop this matter and go on.” After receiving no response to his request, a complaint was filed in a Colorado court in May of this year, demanding monetary damages, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and “any and all other further relief to which the Plaintiff may be entitled.” The parents were the target of the complaint, not their children.
The two kids who stole the money are now old enough to study Computer Science at UK universities, but they now have a bit of additional stress to deal with outside of their studies.
The parents are responding to the complaint by claiming that the “three-year statute of limitations applies” and that Schrober has run out of time to act.
“The statute of limitations does not begin to run until the plaintiff knows or has reason to know both the existence and the cause of his damage,” Schrober’s attorneys respond. Neither set of parents is claiming that their children were involved in the robbery.
It’s unclear who has the upper hand in this case, and Schrober is requesting a jury trial. If he loses, he will have lost over a million dollars, but if he wins, the number of damages he receives will likely depend on what happened to the Bitcoin these teenagers took.
