After stealing $50 million and sending the price of the Cashio stablecoin to zero earlier this month, the thief—whom some victims have dubbed the “crypto Robin Hood”—had a change of heart.
Shortly after the March 23 heist that left some people out hundreds of thousands of dollars—others more than a million—Robin Hood sent a message in an Ethereum transaction saying that all victims who lost less than $100,000 would get their money back.
The rest would be donated to charity, the digital bandit said.
But in a Monday message in a separate Ethereum transaction, Robin Hood expressed yet another change of heart: Victims who lost more than $100,000 will also have a chance to get their money back, as soon as next week. To do so, they would have to fill out an application, according to the message.
“The inntention [sic] was only to take money from those who do not need it, not from those who do,” the message reads.
But not all victims will get their money back. Robin Hood, or the group behind the outlaw, will choose who gets their funds back based on the applications received—the more detail in them, the better.
“Money will not be refund [sic] to rich american and european that don’t need it,” Robin Hood wrote.
Nearly a week ago, Robin Hood exploited what CashioApp called an “infinite mint glitch” to create 2 billion counterfeit tokens of the supposedly stable cryptocurrency Cashio, designed to be pegged to the price of the U.S. Dollar. Through a series of “swaps,” he took the counterfeit crypto and converted it to other stablecoins like USDC; meanwhile, the price of Cashio plunged to two-thousandths of a cent. Eventually, the hacker moved the stolen funds from the Solana blockchain, which Cashio uses, to the Ethereum blockchain.
Robin Hood singled out two individuals, who go by the usernames “jimthereaper” and “The Saint Eclectic” in the Cashio Discord server, to administer the drive to collect applications for victims wanting to plead their cases.
Over the past week, both Discord users—both of whom claim to have lost money in the hack—have been hard at work. Jimthereaper told Coins2Day, “We all are anxious and stressed past 8 days. No body [sic] wanted this, and we all wanna get on with our lives to our loved ones.”
In a push to meet the hacker’s deadline to begin doling out funds next week, jimthereaper and The Saint Eclectic—along with members of the Cashio Discord and of the Discord servers associated with other affected entities like Saber—have put together an application for victims.
Those who have been affected must submit their claim via the application by Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, or 12 a.m. UTC. The claims are being vetted and will be submitted to Robin Hood, according to a tweet by CashioApp.
Although the identity of the hacker is still unknown, as of Thursday, $54 million in Ether was sitting in an account flagged by the Ethereum blockchain “search engine” Etherscan as belonging to the hacker.
Saber, a stablecoin exchange created by Saber Labs and affected by the hack, said in a blog post on Monday that it was working with law enforcement. The exchange is offering $1 million “for actions leading to reclaiming the stolen funds,” and it is willing to negotiate with the hacker, according to the blog post.
