Russian Crypto Suspect Nabbed in Israel—Extradition to US Looms After $190M Nomad Hack

Israeli authorities collar alleged Nomad Bridge attacker Roman Gurevich—just another day in crypto’s Wild West.

The 29-year-old Russian national now faces the music stateside for one of DeFi’s most brazen heists. Extradition papers are already stamped.

Meanwhile, Nomad’s ’reimbursement plan’ still reads like vaporware—because nothing says ’trust us’ like six-figure gas fees and a 3-year roadmap.

The charges against Gurevich in the US versus Israel

The charges against him in the US are much worse than the charges against him in Israel. He could get up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine for each of the five counts. For all four of these computer crimes in Israel, the harshest punishment is only three years in prison. 

In the US, the highest sentence for money laundering is 20 years, which is twice as long as the maximum sentence in Israel.

If Gurevich is extradited to the US and found guilty, he will not be able to serve his term in Israel because he was not living there at the time of the crimes.

The case is being handled by Avi Kronenberg, a lawyer in the International Department of the State Attorney’s Office. Operational Coordination Department of the Israel Police’s National Fraud Unit and the Tel Aviv Fraud Division in charge of the arrests. 

Gurevich-Block was told to stay in jail by Judge Einat Avman-Moller, and a hearing was set for Sunday. 

Ethical crypto hackers are not so ethical

The accusation came from Gurevich telling the Nomad team about it in a string of Telegram texts. He reportedly even asked for a $500,000 reward for finding the weakness in Nomad’s smart contracts that let an attacker use fake transactions to take money out of the protocol.

Crypto hackers often ask the protocol they broke into for a portion of their stolen goods as a reward. Most of the time, the deal includes giving back the rest of the stolen money in exchange for not going after the attacker with the police.

Except for a few famous cases, most hackers haven’t paid attention to these kinds of deals. In May of last year, a hacker stole $72 million from a Bitcoin whale and agreed to return all but 10% of the money.

In August 2022, US officials said Gurevich stole $2.89 million in crypto from Nomad. However, they lost $190 million. This means that there are more people involved. Apparently, a bunch of people tried to use the same attack as soon as it was found. This turned one hacker’s breach into a DeFi free-for-all.

Coinbase reported an attack that showed 88 unique wallet addresses that were later identified as copycats. These wallet addresses took $88 million from the bridge. The participants who took part in the free-for-all hack did things differently than Gurevich, but they all used the same loophole to get money from Nomad.

In the end, some of the people who took part were whitehats, or “ethical hackers,” who work to stop bad players or “blackhats.” Luckily, the funds that these “white hats” took out of Nomad during the attack were returned.

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