KyberSwap exploiter gets five-count criminal indictment after stealing $65M

A federal courtroom in New York unsealed on Feb. 3 a five-count felony indictment in opposition to Andean Medjedovic for allegedly exploiting KyberSwap and Listed Finance to steal $65 million.

Medjedovic has not been apprehended by regulation authorities as of Feb. 3 and stays at massive.

In line with a press release from the US Division of Justice, Medjedovic faces prices of wire fraud, unauthorized harm to a protected laptop, tried Hobbs Act extortion, cash laundering conspiracy, and cash laundering.

The cost of unauthorized harm to a protected laptop carries a most penalty of 10 years in jail, whereas the opposite counts carry a possible 20-year sentence. 

Courtroom paperwork state that Medjedovic allegedly exploited automated good contracts within the KyberSwap and Listed Finance protocols between 2021 and 2023. Medjedovic is accused of borrowing tokens value a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to govern good contract calculations. 

This technique allegedly allowed him to withdraw funds at synthetic costs, rendering traders’ holdings nugatory. 

Authorities alleged that Medjedovic laundered the proceeds by swaps, bridging transactions, and crypto mixers. He’s additionally accused of conspiring with others to open accounts at crypto exchanges utilizing false and borrowed identities to obscure the funds’ origins.

The exploits

In November 2023, after executing the KyberSwap exploit and draining roughly $49 million, Medjedovic allegedly tried to extort the victims. 

He proposed a settlement during which he would acquire management of the KyberSwap protocol and it’s governing decentralized autonomous group (DAO) in alternate for returning half of the stolen property.

In December 2023, KyberSwap dedicated to reimbursing affected customers, providing grants from its treasury equal to the greenback worth the consumer misplaced when the protocol’s liquidity swimming pools have been drained. This system turned efficient on Feb. 1, 2024, with KyberSwap saying that 1,371 customers have been refunded on Feb. 3, 2025.

The incident additionally affected the decentralized alternate aggregator, which lower its workforce in half later that month.

Medjedovic can also be the alleged perpetrator of Listed Finance’s exploit going down in 2021. Two of the protocol’s decentralized indexes have been exploited whereas rebalancing, leading to losses totaling $16 million.

Each protocols have but to get better their complete worth locked (TVL) on the protocols following the safety breaches.