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Comment by danielvf | Hacker News Reader

I've wondered this too. Three reasons:

- It's currently easy enough to hack the same money. Way less effort.

- Doing something physical puts the crime into areas where law enforcement is used to working, used to catching people, and leaves physical evidence in the world. At least in the developed world, kidnapping rich people goes to the head of the line for police resources.

- Most large projects use multisigs. This means you may need to kidnap a half dozen people in multiple counties. Doable, but the odds of none of these failing and exposing the whole operation goes way up.

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That is exactly what the parent comment is saying. $320M makes it worthwhile to do all that for organized crime.

not a single defi hacker has ever been caught or identified. pretty amazing when you consider the amount of money involved.

As far as I know, not one has been caught by law enforcement.

But several attackers have been tracked down by blockchain sleuths, or by the hacked projects themselves. In the usual case, when messaged with personal details about themselves, the attacker gives back 90%, and everyone calls it a day.

Except for this guy.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/12/22/teenage-suspect-i...

Who might be first DeFi hacker to go to trial.

Look at the Indexed Finance hack, the hacker has been identified, and is fighting it in court (or claiming he will anyway), under the argument "code is law"

Definitely an interesting one to watch

Are any of these hacks actually illegal? Genuine question, as I have not been able to find references to DeFi hackers that have been chased by law enforcement. IANAL, but if they are illegal, then it suggests that smart contracts are just to be viewed as automatations of some underlying contract which is subject to legal interpretation. But if such a legal contract does not exist prior to the deployment of the smart contract, then how will one determine which uses of the smart contract are legal, and which that are not? Even the hacks are just making the smart contracts do things that they were programmed to, although PROBABLY unintended.

If the person who was "robbed" involves the law, the executive might compel the "robber" to return the "money". This would be extremely bad looks for the "robbed" in the Crypto Community and unless the identity of thief is known it is impossible.

Another factor might be that actually kidnapping and torturing someone is a very intense thing to do. I don't think a lot of people in the crypto space would have the stomach to do this (and that's a good thing!).

> Though I think this hacker has a greater than average risk of being caught

Why?

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