Dominik Schiener, IOTA Foundation co-founder and co-chairman of its board, has told media that majority of the $11.4 million stolen in IOTA tokens has been found.

Speaking to Reuters, he said that from what the Foundation is aware of, only “a small amount” of the total lost has not been recovered. He did not specify how much this amount could be. Recovered funds are still being held as evidence by authorities against the alleged thief of the tokens.

The Crypto Sight reported a week earlier that an unnamed 36-year-old British man had been arrested by Europol as the main suspect. The thefts affected more than 85 victims worldwide last year. The thief targeted users of a now-defunct website that utilized IOTA wallets in Germany. These wallets were secured by 81-digit security seeds created by the website.

Europol said the thief used a malicious IOTA seed generator hosted on the iotaseed.io domain to create seeds for users that led them to use private keys under his control. He then secured access to victims’ wallets and transferred their holdings to wallets he created using fake IDs.

Schiener said that crypto exchanges had blocked the thief’s accounts, and though the thief tried to free the funds, “he did not succeed”. He revealed that the theft was initially assumed to be the work of an organized group, but eventually appeared to be more likely done by an individual with “a normal job and is well-educated.”

Reuters noted that with the growth of cryptocurrencies in the past three years, crypto related crime has become “a huge problem” – surging more than 400% last year with investor losses of about $1.7 billion.