The rate of cryptocurrency cybercrime is increasing in recent time. A few months back, it was Bitmain, the largest producer of Bitcoin ASIC miners through its attorney that instituted a law suit in a US Federal Court based in Seattle against an unknown thief that stole more than 600 worth of BTC from its account with Binance. The worth of the stolen coins at the time the crime was committed on April 22, was worth about $50,400
Also, in early Sept, Bittrex delisted Bitcoin Gold (BTG) from its platform after a 51% attack which had led to some loss on its platform and the Bitcoin Gold team refused the settling plan of Bittrex exchange.
Now, Aurumcoin (AU), a coin that is backed by pure gold, and presently ranked as the 376th in terms of market capitalization at the time of writing where it trades at $30.37 and has about 298,083 out of its total supply of 300,000, that could be mined as well - has also experienced the same 51 attack as Bitcoin Gold. The open-sourced platform that came into existence in 2014 encountered this with its account with Cryptopia.
Cryptopia, a cryptocurrency exchange based in New Zealand that has helped coins with low market capitalization to be listed, lost about 15,752.26 AU worth more than $500,000. The Aurumcoin team claimed that the fault is not of their part. The Cryptopia exchange team is yet to comment on it.
Also Read: Ultimate Cryptocurrency Exchange Guide
AU pegged at 24K gold had within the last 7 days experienced about 4 times increase, even though it's performance after the attack shows that it is more volatile than the actual market price of pure gold.
Aurumcoin while responding officially about the 51 attack stated in their website that:
"Aurum coin (AU) network was hacked (51 percent attack), a total of 15,752.26 AU is missing from Cryptopia’s wallet (cryptopia.co.nz exchange). Aurum coin network is not the responsibility of anyone, same as bitcoin network, it is an open source distributed crypto currency. What’s worse is that cryptopia exchange do not admit it. This is not the way to solve this problem."
Time will tell if AurumCoin will experience the same fate as Bitcoin Gold with Bittrex exchange did following this attack on its account with Cryptopia.