Hua University top student turned programmer to cyber police, caught a billion-yuan theft gang, and solved Hubei's first virtual currency theft case

BlockBeats news. On April 27, according to Hubei Daily, Guo Tingyu, a police officer from the Cyber Security Team of the Qingshan District Public Security Bureau in Wuhan, Hubei Province, recently received a personal second-class merit award. This young police officer, under 30 years old, graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a major in computer science. After graduation, he entered the Wuhan branch of a Beijing-based internet company as a programmer. In 2023, he took the civil service exam and joined the police force; he has been serving for less than three years.

In early 2024, after being transferred to the Cyber Security Team to take over the first virtual-currency theft case in the entire province, Guo Tingyu handled an incident in which the victim downloaded a fake virtual-currency wallet APP, resulting in the theft of virtual currency worth more than 300,000 yuan. At the time, the province had yet to have any experience investigating and solving such cases. Guo Tingyu carried out analysis from three directions: the virtual-currency distribution address, the back-end for developing the fake wallet, and the fund flow link. After nearly 70 days of intensive efforts, he identified the suspect’s identity from the development code of the fake wallet APP. After investigation, it was found that the fake APP developed by the gang passed muster in app stores and was promoted to induce users to download it. The cumulative number of downloads reached more than 10,000 times. The funds involved exceeded 100 million yuan. Ultimately, all five suspects were arrested and received severe legal penalties.

In February 2025, a ransomware attack hit the server of a large equipment design company within the jurisdiction. In nearly a year, about 400+ G of core design data was encrypted, and the company faced the risk of breach compensation amounting to several million yuan. After Guo Tingyu arrived at the scene, he found a hidden backup on the disk. After 8 hours of continuous work, he restored all the core data. He then used server operation logs to investigate and identify the virus files, tracing the source to a foreign IP address.

As of now, Guo Tingyu has participated in solving 2 ministerial-level cases and 6 provincial-level cases, and has continuously cracked more than a dozen virtual-currency-related criminal cases. When he reviewed the cases, he said that every cybercrime leaves traces. People working in the technical field should maintain reverence for technology and not open Pandora’s box of doing harm with technology.