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

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

#791

Post by alfalfasprout »

johnmarcus wrote: post #461
kart23 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what the... no way they just kept an unencrypted private key on the cloud.

the file was encrypted, but the fbi hacked it after already having gained access to the account (via warrent). Which is to say, this isn't how they actually got cought, it's just how the nail will go in the coffin (and thankfully for those impacted, some funds recovered). FWIW, if you ever find yourself in this position of owning a large amount of stolen crypto, I believe the best way to wash it would be to "robin ho…

or buy extremely expensive tangible assets (diamonds, gold, bulk quantities of drugs). But billions of dollars worth? Forget it.

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

#792

Post by runeks »

loceng wrote: post #364
runeks wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no solution because you would end up punishing innocent people. E.g. if a thief buys a car with their proceeds then it's not fair to punish the car dealership by confiscating the originally-stolen coins. This was decided in Scotland in 1749, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfurd_v_The_Royal_Bank

How exactly are you punishing innocent people? What's happening is you're rewarding thieves. Your example doesn't fit what I am saying either. With a digital currency you can do a pre-sale trick, so you'll see the funds were stolen - and you then don't sell them the car in the first place. We can't incentivize theft.

> With a digital currency you can do a pre-sale trick, so you'll see the funds were stolen - and you then don't sell them the car in the first place.

It's a race against time. As soon as the coins are sent to a new address you can't know whether goods or services were exchanged in this process and you are thus punishing a well-intentioned seller as opposed to the thief.

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

#793

Post by runeks »

swarsh wrote: post #561
runeks wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no solution because you would end up punishing innocent people. E.g. if a thief buys a car with their proceeds then it's not fair to punish the car dealership by confiscating the originally-stolen coins. This was decided in Scotland in 1749, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawfurd_v_The_Royal_Bank

That Scottish decision, while still the basis for bona fide acquisition of money in the UK and US, does not yet appear to apply for cryptocurrencies. Your Wikipedia link cites a 2019 paper published in the Georgetown Technical Law Review whose analysis ( https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/... ) on page 415-6 says that 2016 US v 50.44 Bitcoins ( https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-5044-b…

To be clear, I'm arguing that the same reasoning behind the Scottish decision is why cryptocurrencies don't have a built-in features that prevent stolen cryptocurrency funds from being spent: because it would make the currency non-fungible.

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

#794

Post by dragonelite »

arcticbull wrote: post #439
cobookman wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he instead started to draw NFTs, and sell it from his KYC account to his dirty wallet, could he still be convicted? What if only one out of every 100 NFTs his dirty wallet purchased was from his KYC account? Or what if he decided to create his own crypto-currency and it just so happened that his dirty wallet was an early investor of ETH to his fund. Seems like he could have done more to distance himself.

> Seems like he could have done more to distance himself. Bitcoin's public ledger makes transactions into prosecution futures. This is why it's such a poor choice for revolutionaries and funding the marginalized. You leave a permanent indelible public record in posterity that will in the course of time be de-anonymized, automatically, and traced back to you.

Yeah somehow those crypto expert on social media don't even think about it, when they shout bitcoin will fix this.

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

#795

Post by radicaldreamer »

vmchale wrote: post #693
digianarchist wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly don’t know why people don’t AES/GPG encrypt the keys and send a message to alt.anonymous.messages. That’s 30+ years of storage for free.

maybe he backed up to icloud by accident

I bet he just got opted into iCloud Drive documents and desktop folders.

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

#796

Post by xwolfi »

rasz wrote: post #7

"Today Ilya Lichtenstein is the co-founder of the Y Combinator backed Mix Rank," One of the first Google results for the names returns 'Get your first $1 million in enterprise sales with zero marketing spend' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuIr5IFQ9Xg Heather R Morgan Serial entrepreneur SaaS Investor Razzlekhan = Surrealist Artist, Rapper & Fashion Designer with synesthesia Also Forbes writer https://www.inc.com/he…

No they nabbed them for using stolen funds to create startups in the first place. They had no products (https://web.archive.org/web/20220113181658/https://endpass.c...)

She presents herself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWq7JgRknTM , I suppose you know what kind of person she is right ? The kind that use pipes as in "Economist | MBA | Serial Entrepreneur | Rapper "in their linkedin profiles but do nothing at all once hired :)

She was more truthful 7 years ago: https://youtu.be/NQAA2LlabUg?t=84 where she listed her main skill as copy writing.

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

#797

Post by danjac »

rasz wrote: post #7

"Today Ilya Lichtenstein is the co-founder of the Y Combinator backed Mix Rank," One of the first Google results for the names returns 'Get your first $1 million in enterprise sales with zero marketing spend' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuIr5IFQ9Xg Heather R Morgan Serial entrepreneur SaaS Investor Razzlekhan = Surrealist Artist, Rapper & Fashion Designer with synesthesia Also Forbes writer https://www.inc.com/he…

To be fair though, you could have your cat just randomly jump all over your keyboard and Kitty would get herself published in Forbes. They're not known for their high bar.

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

#798

Post by danjac »

colinmhayes wrote: post #5
danso wrote: post #3

The statement of facts is linked to from the press release, and describes generally how the Feds were able to trace the stolen funds (they found a file listing private keys, after gaining access to the suspect's cloud storage) https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1470186/downl... > The 2017 transfers notwithstanding, the majority of the stolen funds remained in Wallet 1CGA4s from August 2016 until January 3…

$4 billion has got to buy an awful lot of compute time, but still, how did they decrypt the file?

Private key was uploaded to cloud storage that Feds had access to with a search warrant.

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

#799

Post by shp0ngle »

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 criminal ever

well they caught him, so not that great, eh

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

#800

Post by birracerveza »

Barrin92 wrote: post #507
initplus wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we have the government to weigh in on which transactions are legitimate or not, why do we need a distributed ledger? Cryptocurrencies are trustless, but if we can trust the government to rule on ownership fairly why do we need a trustless system?

>why do we need a distributed ledger? well the most obvious answer to that question is, we don't.

And it's obviously a wrong answer.
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