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Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#611

Post by spyder »

albroland wrote: post #6

fwiw, it appears one of the named here is a YC Alum: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=il https://www.linkedin.com/in/unrealdutch/

Heh... He has some comments on "Feds reveal the search warrant used to seize Mt. Gox account " in 2013:

As the anarchists and idealists on HN will soon learn, the decentralized nature of Bitcoin won't make a difference if anyone transmitting it is in violation of federal law. --

This was inevitable. People can wax rhapsodic about the decentralized nature of Bitcoin, but once the feds freeze a few million dollars of a major exchange's assets, as they have done with every single anonymous digital currency since the beginning of time (e-gold,1mdc,Liberty Dollar) and launch a criminal investigation, the currency will be severely destabilized. Within the next year I expect to see a cottage industry emerge where the true believers cash out frozen bitcoin accounts for pennies on the dollar.

and a few other:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il&next=5714990

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#612

Post by from »

vmception wrote: post #175
shiado wrote: post #82

It never ceases to amaze me how incompetent some high profile criminals are. Encrypting a file is simply too difficult apparently. The entire purpose of crypto is that the exclusive holder of a private key cannot have funds seized. A 15 year old kid probably has better opsec with their crypto wallets than these people. Astonishing really.

yeah I've never seen a crypto investigation that made me impressed with the government's abilities, nothing that surprised me about the utility of OPSEC best practices, only people with weak links and dumb behaviors that are incompatible with doing something criminal.

You're not serious, right? You clearly haven't seen some of the latest unlicensed money transmitter prosecutions. The resourceful agents over at HSI have come up with an incredibly effective method of stopping crime in the Bitcoin network. It looks something like:

CS1: "I would like to exchange these dollars which I represent to be the proceeds of the sale of controlled substances in violation of the Controlled Substances Act for Bitcoin."

Localbitcoins trader: "OK."

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#613

Post by mbesto »

hnburnsy wrote: post #584
pshc wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a hardware wallet is good, although for a billion dollars, 100 hardware wallets would be better. Could even go so far as to split a private key into seven horcruxes using Shamir's Secret Sharing and bury them in locations around the world. Memorizing a seed phrase leaves you vulnerable to a $5 wrench attack, I wouldn't recommend it.

The famous Bitcoin family reportedly spread their hardware wallets across the globe. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/11/bitcoin-family-hides-bitcoin...

Or the Winklevoss twins who store their codes in separate banks across the country.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#614

Post by pcurve »

caseysoftware wrote: post #65

I'm sitting here trying to understand their mindset. They had to know what kind of scrutiny would be on those coins forever. At the time of the theft, the coins are worth $100M+ and they can't touch them. Even worse, anything they do with them will be monitored, researched, dug into, and everything else from law enforcement, amateur detectives, and every major tech+crime group. Fast forward to now and the coins are w…

I thought maybe they could go to a country without any extradition treaty And has no diplomatic relationship with the U.S. Then cut a deal with the government.

It's a slim picking...

Iran North Korea Syria Bhutan Taiwan Azerbaijan Palestine Georgia Cyprus Western Sahara

Even Russia has too much to lose. Maybe if it were $360 Billion, they might consider it.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#615

Post by kelseyfrog »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #321
kelseyfrog wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a crypto unbeliever I hate this too. Legal enforcement legitimizes crypto as property. It expands the definition of property by institutionally conferring the status of "owned" to a functional configuration of bits distributed over thousands of computers. Do we have this concept for other things? yes. But I'd rather like to contract the space of property rather than expand it.

> Legal enforcement legitimizes crypto as property People standing ready to buy legitimizes crypto as property. I don't love crypto. But prohibition has never worked as intended.

In the context of crypto-as-property constructivism, I'm neither an absolute institutional nor a communal conferralist. Presently, it appears like there is much more communal conferralism constructing crypto as property, I'd like to avoid institutionalization. In practice, this would not look like prohibition, rather the avoidance of extending existing property laws to encompass crypto assets. ie: courts and lawmakers saying, "No we're not going to get involved." Unfortunately, any future crisis where crypto can be blamed is a convenient way to extend to crypto the legal construction of it's status as property.

Since you brought up prohibition, I'll take the bait. We already have prohibitive socio-legal constructions which few people use to form the basis of "prohibition has never worked, so we should not prohibit it." Some examples that are socially and legally prohibited are: murder, rape, incest, slavery, torture, buying and selling of children. I'm unsure if you believe that the prohibition of these acts has also never worked as intended and should be left unprohibited.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#616

Post by easrng »

judge2020 wrote: post #607
voldacar wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just sell the bitcoin for monero, then sell the monero for btc. also, as time goes on, the proportion of btc that are "dirty" approaches 1, so these chainalysis strategies become less effective, assuming you aren't stupid enough to do some criminal act then cash out at a kyc exchange the next day from the same wallet

But are there any exchanges that swap btc for monero or eth that don’t have KYC requirements? Seems like it’d need to be off-chain somewhat, unlike uniswap.

There are atomic swaps between BTC and XMR at least (see https://unstoppableswap.net/) but for centralized exchanges check kycnot.me

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#617

Post by slim »

CrazyStat wrote: post #388
trhway wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reading a bit about him and the hack (which at some point was for example blamed on those Israeli brothers with connections to IDF hacking unit) i kind of not sure that he is the hacker ( and note that he is charged with laundering not hacking) - he in my view better fits the profile of the "investor"/"fencer" whose involvement would be to launder. Sidenote: one of the reasons i don't touch crypto is possible launder…

> Sidenote: one of the reasons i don't touch crypto is possible laundering charge/suspicion if the tokens happens to had passed through unsavory hands/situation A page recently posted here ([1], citing [2]) claimed that there's a market for freshly mined Bitcoin (i.e. with no history), with people paying as much as 20% markup for it to avoid such risks. I didn't make any attempt to verify this claim. [1] https://seth…

So you get 1.2 btc from unknown origin for 1 fresh btc. looks like the simplest laundering scheme.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#618

Post by wolverine876 »

paulpauper wrote: post #178
albroland wrote: post #6

fwiw, it appears one of the named here is a YC Alum: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=il https://www.linkedin.com/in/unrealdutch/

This is just unreal. this guy was living a double life of being the greatest criminal ever. So among our community was a $4 billion hacker, just nonchalantly posting. I don't think he will be commenting anytime soon again if this really is him https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=il like your neighbor being a serial killer or something

> greatest

Assuming their guilt: "worst", or "most shameful" are the terms I would use. An embarassment to any community they were in.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#619

Post by hkt »

judge2020 wrote: post #607
voldacar wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just sell the bitcoin for monero, then sell the monero for btc. also, as time goes on, the proportion of btc that are "dirty" approaches 1, so these chainalysis strategies become less effective, assuming you aren't stupid enough to do some criminal act then cash out at a kyc exchange the next day from the same wallet

But are there any exchanges that swap btc for monero or eth that don’t have KYC requirements? Seems like it’d need to be off-chain somewhat, unlike uniswap.

There are decentralised exchanges like bisq: https://bisq.wiki/Main_Page

Presumably, this would do the trick.

Re: Feds arrest couple, seize $3.6B in hacked Bitcoin funds

#620

Post by CamelRocketFish »

frontman1988 wrote: post #570
zkldi wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jeez man, not every comment has to be a profound statement. I thought it was pretty interesting.

It's good to add some value with your comment though. You can talk about how she was as a person or some other interesting anecdote

There was value, the person expressed it’s a strange feeling seeing a name you recognise in an article like this. Other people may find that enough to relate to.
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