A man in France was sentenced to 5 years in prison for illegally issuing and stealing 1 billion HLG tokens, of which 2 years are to be served in prison

On Friday, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced a Ukrainian man to 5 years in prison, with 2 years of actual imprisonment and 3 years of probation. The man was accused of illegally generating and stealing 1 billion Holograph (HLG) tokens, valued at approximately 14 million dollars at the time of the incident, by exploiting vulnerabilities in the permissions of the company he previously worked for between May and August 2024.

The court found that the man illegally issued 1 billion HLG tokens by tampering with the token generation conditions on the platform and transferred the tokens to a personal wallet. He then, along with two accomplices, dispersed the funds to multiple cryptocurrency exchange platform accounts. His two accomplices were sentenced to 2 years in prison (with 14 months on probation) and a fine of 80,000 euros, as well as 2 years of probationary imprisonment and a fine of 40,000 euros.

In addition, the court rejected the Holograph Foundation's request for compensation for the losses due to the token price crash, stating that the price of HLG had already fluctuated and declined significantly before the incident, making it impossible to establish a direct causal relationship between the subsequent depreciation and the fraudulent activities. After the incident, the price of HLG dropped from nearly 0.03 dollars in May 2024 to 0.001 dollars by the end of December of the same year.