On Thursday morning, Australian police arrested a Sydney-based woman for purportedly stealing nearly $450,000 in Ripple (XRP) from the electronic account of a 56-year old man.
The arrest was made after a 10-month investigation into the theft of 100,000 Ripple’s native tokens (XRP) from a cryptocurrency wallet owned by an elderly man.
At that time, 450, 000 Australian Dollars were equivalent to 100, 000 XRP. Given the volatile nature of digital assets, however, the value has since plummeted to around 45,000 Australian Dollars at press time. Ripple (XRP) is now trading at $0.454 per token at the time of writing, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
The 56-year-old victim told the police he had been locked out of his account and his email had been hacked. When he recovered his crypto wallet, he found out that someone had allegedly accessed his wallet and transferred more than 100,000 into a China-based cryptocurrency exchange. The thief later converted the coins into Bitcoin.
Earlier this month, Victorian police cautioned people against falling for a scam in which four people lost a total of 50,000 AUD after depositing money into a bitcoin ATM.
The Crime Investigation Unit said that the four people from Melbourne were informed they haven’t settled their tax debts and they would be apprehended if they didn’t pay. They were, therefore, lured into depositing their money in a Bitcoin ATM to pay their debt.
The Australian Taxation Office issued a warning a few months ago urging the public to be extremely careful when it comes to the mysterious crypto space after it became known that over $50,000 in BTC was paid to fraudsters masquerading as Tax officials.
Since the country’s taxation office doesn’t have transparency over what digital assets are owned by taxpayers, Austrac only recently received court approval to monitor the cryptocurrency space for anti-money laundering purposes.