In May of last year, two brothers in their 20s were arrested for what the Justice Department at the time called “attacking the Ethereum blockchain and stealing $25 million.” Attacking the blockchain does sound like a cool, sci-fi crime, but the brothers maintained that they were just aggressive traders, not criminals.

Yesterday, their prosecution culminated in what sounds like a very stressful mistrial.

The prosecution’s case was that Anton Peraire-Bueno and James Pepaire-Bueno set a trap amounting to fraud. Prosecutors said they preyed upon crypto trading bots that moved digital money around on behalf of, apparently, three entities tied to actual human beings—although only one, David Yakira, ever came forward as an alleged victim.

The trading bots were targeted because they were performing what are known as “sandwich transactions” and were allegedly lured into situations that caused them to glitch out and release valuable tokens in exchange for, well, shitcoins.

Then, the brothers allegedly tried to launder their winnings.

Performing digital muggings (allegedly!) on bots that execute sandwich transactions required extreme sophistication and the ability to spot an exploit that wasn’t expressly forbidden in the Wild West universe that is crypto land.
https://gizmodo.com/crypto-bros-mistrial-was-such-an-emotional-burden-for-deadlocked-jurors-that-half-of-them-cried-2000682333