A federal court in New York recently unsealed a five-count criminal indictment against Andean Medjedovic for allegedly exploiting KyberSwap and Indexed Finance to steal $65 million. Despite the charges, Medjedovic remains at large and has not been apprehended by law enforcement authorities.
The indictment includes charges of wire fraud, unauthorized damage to a protected computer, attempted Hobbs Act extortion, money laundering conspiracy, and money laundering. If convicted, Medjedovic could face penalties ranging from 10 to 20 years in prison for each count.
Court documents reveal that Medjedovic allegedly manipulated automated smart contracts within the KyberSwap and Indexed Finance protocols between 2021 and 2023. By borrowing tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he was able to exploit smart contract calculations, ultimately withdrawing funds at artificial prices and leaving investors with worthless holdings.
To conceal the proceeds of his schemes, Medjedovic reportedly engaged in money laundering activities such as swaps, bridging transactions, and the use of crypto mixers. He also allegedly conspired with others to open accounts at crypto exchanges using false and borrowed identities in order to obfuscate the origins of the illicit funds.
One of the prominent exploits attributed to Medjedovic involved KyberSwap, where he drained approximately $49 million in November 2023. Following the exploit, he attempted to extort the victims by proposing a settlement that would grant him control of the KyberSwap protocol and its governing decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in exchange for returning half of the stolen assets.
In response to the incident, KyberSwap committed to reimbursing affected users by offering grants from its treasury equal to the dollar value lost during the liquidity pool drain. The reimbursement program went into effect on February 1, 2024, with 1,371 users receiving refunds by February 3, 2025. The exploit also had repercussions on the decentralized exchange aggregator, which subsequently reduced its workforce by half.
Indexed Finance was another target of Medjedovic’s exploits, as he allegedly manipulated two of the protocol’s decentralized indexes during rebalancing in 2021, resulting in losses totaling $16 million. Both KyberSwap and Indexed Finance have yet to fully recover their total value locked (TVL) following these security breaches.
The investigation into Medjedovic’s alleged crimes is ongoing, and authorities are actively working to bring him to justice and recover the stolen funds.