Taylor Monahan on the $30M bank hack that exchanges couldn’t freeze

Investigators traced stolen bank funds into crypto, but without a confirmed victim, exchanges had no green light to act Hackers stole $30 million from a bank, moved it into fresh accounts, and used it to buy crypto. Investigators tracked the money in near real time. The exchanges holding it still couldn’t freeze it. Nobody had officially confirmed there was a victim. That is the frustrating core of a case Taylor Monahan, the security researcher and MyCrypto founder, unpacked in a conversation with journalist Laura Shin on or about November 4, 2026. It is a heist story where the bottleneck wasn’t the blockchain. It was a missing phone call from the bank. How the money moved According to the account Monahan and Shin discussed, the attackers pulled approximately $30 million out of accounts at the bank. They didn’t send it straight into crypto. Instead, the funds first went into newly opened fiat accounts. From there, the hackers converted the money into crypto across several centralized exchanges. Once the money touched public blockchains, it became visible. That is where ZachXBT, the independent on-chain investigator, entered the picture. ZachXBT traced the flow of the stolen funds a...