Ex-Amazon Engineer Gets Three Years for Hacking DeFi Platforms

A former Amazon.com software engineer who admitted to stealing millions of dollars in cryptocurrency by hacking two decentralized finance platforms was ordered to spend three years behind bars.

Shakeeb Ahmed, 34, was sentenced Friday by US District Judge Victor Marrero on Friday. Ahmed pleaded guilty in December to taking advantage of flaws in the DeFi platforms’ so-called smart contracts to insert fake pricing data, generating about $12 million of inflated and unearned profits that he was able to withdraw in cryptocurrency.

Such contracts are computer programs that automatically execute transactions when predetermined conditions are met. One of the platforms Ahmed ...