UwU Lend announces $5m bounty as hacker starts laundering stolen funds via Tornado Cash

Decentralized lending protocol UwU Lend announced a $5 million reward to “identify and locate” the exploiter.

UwU Lend developers are promising to pay up to $5 million to “the first person to identify and find” a hacker who exploited the protocol for more than $23 million worth of crypto. The reward was announced shortly after the attacker missed the deadline set by the UwU Lend team, which expected 80% of the stolen funds to be returned in exchange for a 20% reward.

As crypto researcher @CryptoEvgen noted on the X account, the hacker began transferring the stolen assets through Tornado Cash, a mixing service approved by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for facilitating the laundering of approximately $7 billion in cryptocurrencies. 2019.

As of the moment the news was published, it was understood that the hacker had laundered at least 500 ETH, worth approximately $1.7 million at current market prices.

Using open source AAVE v2 code, UwU Lend was subjected to two separate attacks in less than three days by the same hacker that appeared to be flash loan attacks that compromised multiple liquidity pools.

Founded by Michael Patryn, also known as Omar Dhanani or “0xSifu,” co-founder of the defunct QuadrigaCX exchange, UwU Lend provides lending, borrowing and staking services while the platform distributes revenues through its native token, UwU.