French Man Sentenced to 5 Years in Prison for Stealing 1 Billion HLG Tokens

A Ukrainian man has been sentenced to five years in prison by the Paris Criminal Court, with two years of actual imprisonment and three years suspended. The man was accused of illegally generating and stealing 1 billion Holograph (HLG) tokens, valued at approximately $14 million at the time of the crime, by exploiting a loophole in the permissions of the company where he was previously employed between May and August 2024. The court found that the man illegally minted 1 billion HLG tokens by tampering with the token generation conditions on the platform and transferred the tokens to his personal wallet. He then distributed the funds across multiple cryptocurrency exchange accounts with two accomplices. His two accomplices received sentences of two years in prison (14 months suspended) and a fine of €80,000, and two years of suspended imprisonment with a fine of €40,000. The court rejected the Holograph Foundation's request for compensation for the loss due to the token price crash, stating that the HLG price had already experienced significant fluctuations and declines before the incident, making it impossible to establish a direct causal relationship between the subsequent devaluation and the fraudulent act. Following the incident, the price of HLG dropped from nearly $0.03 in May 2024 to $0.001 by the end of December of the same year.