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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

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Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#101

Post by Scoundreller »

msherry wrote: post #15
Ascetik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what I've read, the NSA and other white-hat organizations have access to 0-days or have discovered 0-days that can crack these things but they're not released to the public or if they are, they're released years later.

TFA says that Ernst and Young was the company to crack the laptop. Ernst and Young would not burn a zero-day exploit on an auditing job.

Then TFA was wrong.

E&Y’s own reports say that it was the Applicant’s own “expert” that tried to break in.

The applicant is the founder’s widow.

The expert doesn’t seem to have much of a specialization for breaking into computers. Who knows what kind of mess he caused.

S. 12

https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#102

Post by tim333 »

uberman wrote: post #3

For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…

And the widow is left with just the 17 properties, 2 cars, yacht and plane that he earned through honest hard work.

Another thing you could work into the plot is $9m appears to be with WB21 "Banking Redefined" which claimed a million users but was discovered to only have 135 downloads of its app (now removed), is run by a convicted fraudster and was awarded "Global Banker Award 2018" in a black tie ceremony that they seem to have set up themselves to give themselves the award (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbKMdhpwbaw). They are still going I think if you are looking for a safe place to put your money. https://amycastor.com/2019/03/01/diving-into-wb21-the-compan...

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#103

Post by thaumasiotes »

ttoinou wrote: post #97
thaumasiotes wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s important to note that it’s not just splitting up your own transactions, it’s that it’s actually other people’s coins that end up in your destination wallets. As such, it becomes very difficult to trace It was my basically uninformed impression that the bitcoin blockchain consists of a series of transaction records that look like this: - Address xxxxx1x sends 10 bitcoins to address xxxxx2x; address xxxxx7x min…

(The fact that you can divide one bitcoin into 100,000,000 satoshi also suggests that there's no such thing as an individual bitcoin...) Wouldn't it rather say "there is such a thing as a satoshi" ?

No, because my first argument still applies in full to satoshi. There are balances of satoshi, but no individual satoshi.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#104

Post by samfisher83 »

whttheuuu wrote: post #90
samfisher83 wrote: post #29

People might complain about banks, but when you have cases of fraud at least you have people try to recover it. Government makes you keep pretty good records. In this case how do you undo the blockchain? In this case what recourse do you have.

actually, the entire point of blockchain is that the ledger is public. every movement of each and every bitcoin is public and can be tracked. it just takes time to analyze.

Its public, but you can't reverse it.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#105

Post by dd36 »

blotter_paper wrote: post #94
deepsun wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can still track history of any coin existed. If somebody know wallet ids of money before they were stolen, you can trace transactions to see what wallet ids they are in now. If they say "stolen", it means that they found transactions when money were transferred from victim's wallet. And if they know transactions, then they know source and destination wallet ids.

This is close enough to true for the purposes of this discussion, but in the general case you can only reliably track the flow of funds in aggregate, not the flow of any individual "coin." If addresses A and B send equal amounts of coins to C, C sends all of those coins to D, and D sends half of them to E, you can't really track the coins from A to E or from B to E. The transaction from C to D results in a single out…

You track D and E. At scale, there surely are consistent patterns.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#106

Post by maxander »

jessaustin wrote: post #77
quickthrower2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And making blockchain to SQL Server migration consultants wealthy too.

We would have believed postgres, but that's just far-fetched.

Blockchain to CSV, realistically.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#107

Post by drexlspivey »

zaphirplane wrote: post #87
glitch003 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole point of the blockchain. Your money is sovereign. There is nobody to call when it gets stolen, but this also means that no government or bank or agency can take your money or prevent you from being paid (see Visa/Mastercard vs Wikileaks etc)

Not true, an entity with control of >50% of the pool can. I thought such a pool exists

Even with 100% of hashpower you can't steal anyone's money

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#108

Post by Tomte »

jessaustin wrote: post #80
godelski wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still commit fraud and die of Crohn's Disease. I'd still call this a conspiracy theory (I'll also say that "conspiracy theory" doesn't mean untrue, though we tend to use it as a substitute for "crack pot"). But to quote Sagan "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I do agree with this part: > It's clear there's a massive fraud But that doesn't mean he's alive or that there was a coverup in his…

Which claim is "extraordinary"? That some humans pretend to die before their actual deaths? That some humans are greedy? I got a bridge I'll sell you real cheap...

Pretending to die is an extraordinarily rare occurrence, yes.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#109

Post by tempestn »

deepsun wrote: post #79
Scoundreller wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has been able to identify any cold wallets with any significant deposits. This should have been easily found by analyzing user deposits and withdrawals, but so far, nada.

Then it's not "stolen", it's "never existed".

The customer deposits certainly existed somewhere, even if a single cold wallet holding $137M in BTC didn't.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#110

Post by mannykannot »

whttheuuu wrote: post #90
samfisher83 wrote: post #29

People might complain about banks, but when you have cases of fraud at least you have people try to recover it. Government makes you keep pretty good records. In this case how do you undo the blockchain? In this case what recourse do you have.

actually, the entire point of blockchain is that the ledger is public. every movement of each and every bitcoin is public and can be tracked. it just takes time to analyze.

Even if that were so, it would not be sufficient for restitution, but bitcoins and satoshi are just abstractions and do not have individual identity, and cannot, in general, be individually tracked.
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