Cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain, which has been eyeing an initial public offering (IPO), has filed a “John Doe” lawsuit against a hacker that allegedly stole cryptocurrency worth $5.5 million from its account on crypto exchange Binance.

According to the lawsuit, filed with the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, the theft occurred in April and saw the hacker manipulate the price of Decentraland (MANA) to get the funds.

The document claims that the hacker managed to take over Bitmain’s account. Instead of immediately trying to withdraw the funds – which could’ve triggered Binance’s security systems – the hacker used two other accounts on Binance and one on Bittrex to pull off the heist.

It notes the hacker acquired roughly 2.3 million MANA tokens on Bittrex, which were then used to inflate the cryptocurrency’s price on Binance. Using Bitmain’s “approximately 617 BTC” and other cryptocurrencies, the hacker set buy orders he got filled with the MANA he owned.

Per CryptoCompare data, this saw the price of MANA artificially shoot up to about 0.00003 BTC, before dropping to less than 0.00002 BTC per token in April. Curiously, a similar price jump also occurred in July, although it’s currently unclear whether it’s related to Bitmain’s incident.

MANA's price pumped in April, likely because of the hack

Some of Bitmain’s BTC was reportedly used to buy ETH, which was then used to buy MANA as well. The hacker, per the lawsuit, then still traded his BTC for MANA using Bitmain’s account, presumably to avoid looking suspicious. He then managed to withdraw his funds “into a digital wallet on the Bittrex cryptocurrency trading platform.”

According to some experts, Bitmain’s lawsuit may force Binance and/or Bittrex to reveal the hacker’s identity, as both exchanges enforce know-your-customer (KYC) checks and are likely able to find out who’s responsible for the incident.

The lawsuit was filed at a time in which Bitmain is looking to deploy 90,000 Antimer S9 ASICs ahead of the November 15 bitcoin cash (BCH) hard fork. Curiously, the incident came to light as Decentraland’s popularity started picking up, after someone spent 2.7 million mana tokens to acquire virtual land.

As CryptoGlobe covered, cryptocurrency exchange theft hit nearly $1 billion in the first nine months of this year, according to a report published by US-based cybersecurity firm CipherTrace. Recently, cybercriminals also tried to compromise the Gate.io exchange to steal funds.