US authorities have charged two British teenagers in Colorado with stealing a cryptocurrency wallet containing $772,000 worth of bitcoin.

According The Telegraph & Argus newspaper, citing court documents filed in Denver, Colorado, said the thieves installed malicious software to hijack the digital wallet from the victim’s device and then stole 16,4552 bitcoins.

According to the lawsuit’s statement:

The malware was designed by the defendants to secretly install itself on the hard drive of the victim’s computer and to monitor the activity of the victim’s computer, by secretly requesting that the computer run a pattern matching algorithm each time the victim used copy-and-paste. “Clipboard”) on his computer.

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Victim Andrew Chopper’s computer was hacked by teens after he was persuaded to install a program called “Electrum Atom”.

The incident occurred around January 2018, and as of press time, the value of the stolen bitcoin is $772,120.77, with the cryptocurrency trading at $47,000 at the time of writing.

Authorities revealed that both teenagers are from Bradford and Southampton, UK, and have good technical knowledge due to their studies in computer science.

Tracing the thieves by the victim:

Court documents also indicated that Chopper spent nearly $10,000 tracking down the people who stole his bitcoin.

Chopper put 95% of his net worth on his cryptocurrency holdings.

In October 2018, Mr. Chopper sent an email to the defendants asking them to return the stolen cryptocurrency.

As of the date of this complaint, the defendants had not responded to Mr. Choper’s request to return his cryptocurrency, US authorities said.

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