It took nearly eight hours for the Munchables developer, who was responsible for an exploit, to return $62.8 million worth of Ether stolen without demanding any ransom. On March 26 around 9:30 pm UTC, Munchables reported a hack that took 17,400 ETH from the GameFi app.

The Munchables team, along with PeckShield and ZachXBT, monitored the stolen funds to try intercepting them. According to ZachXBT, the hacker was a North Korean developer hired by the Munchables team under the alias “Werewolves0943.”

On March 27 at 4:40 am UTC, Munchables confirmed the hacker was one of their developers. After negotiations, the ex-developer agreed to return the stolen funds. In an official statement, Munchables shared that they had all the necessary private keys to recover the funds.

Pacman, the creator of the Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Blast, thanked ZachXBT for his support and confirmed that the ex-Munchables developer returned all funds without a ransom. As Munchables was built on Blast, Pacman will work with their team to redistribute the now-recovered funds.

To avoid falling for refund scams, victims of the hack should only follow communications from official sources. The exploit happened shortly after a hacker stole $24,000 from four ParaSwap addresses, which the protocol later recovered and began refunding users.

Despite resolving the issue with the help of white hat hackers, ParaSwap noted that 213 addresses had yet to revoke allowances for the vulnerable AugustusV6 smart contract as of March 25.