The Delhi Police’s Special Cell is currently investigating a case of cryptocurrency theft involving around Rs 4 crore stolen from a businessman in west Delhi. They faced challenges in tracking down the end users of the stolen funds. However, a significant breakthrough occurred when Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, shared information about suspect wallets used by terrorist groups for funding, including the al Qassam brigades of Hamas, a Palestinian terror group.
This revelation marks the first instance of Hamas activity in India. The Special Cell’s Intelligence Fusion & Strategic Ops (IFSO) unit compared these wallets and found that some of them had received the stolen Bitcoin and Ethereum assets from Delhi. These wallets were operated by the cyber terrorism wing of Hamas. There are concerns that Hamas may try to collect funds through hacking in pro-Israel countries.
In a recent development, the cyber unit of Israel Police froze numerous cryptocurrency accounts held by Hamas for fundraising, and they requested cryptocurrency exchange Binance to transfer the seized funds to Israel’s state treasury.
The Special Cell officers shared their findings with relevant authorities, confirming the connections to the al Qassam brigades. This case originally surfaced in 2019 at Paschim Vihar police station and was later transferred to the Special Cell by court orders.
After uncovering the Hamas link, technical analysis revealed that one of the seized wallets belonged to Naseer Ibrahim Abdulla in Gaza, while other wallets were connected to Hamas operatives in different regions. The stolen cryptocurrencies were routed through various private wallets before ending up in these suspected wallets.