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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

#831

Post by lmm »

cobookman wrote: post #454
arcticbull wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it illegal to sell your artwork at an auction, and a criminal happens to be the one to buy it? I honestly don't know. is the onus on an artist or on an "auction house" to vet buyers. If post sale it turns out the money was fraudulent, does the artist need to pay it back? In crypto terms. You the artist simply put a NFT up for auction at OpenSea. You the scammer happened to purchase the artwork on OpenSea. However…

> Is it illegal to sell your artwork at an auction, and a criminal happens to be the one to buy it? I honestly don't know.

Law on receiving stolen goods is vague, complex, and jurisdiction-dependent. But in some cases, if the money you get paid is "the same" money that was stolen (something that's actually much easier to show with Bitcoin, where every input to every transaction is another transaction's output), and you know about the crime, yes. See People ex Rel. Briggs v. Hanley.

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

#832

Post by tim333 »

spullara wrote: post #765
bostonsre wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why he wouldn't move to somewhere that doesn't have an extradition policy with the US. If you go down that path, it seems like you should probably be willing to abandon your life. It's the same with Ross Ulbricht, seems like it would be terrifying living with that sword of damocles hanging over your head absolutely constantly.

$4B that you can't spend in the US (or any country that will allow for extradition) isn't nearly as good as $4B that you can.

Shoulda just changed it to Monero, transferred it to an anon account and then had that account buy dumb NFTs off himself. That seems to be how it's done these days.

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

#833

Post by projektfu »

dazilcher wrote: post #367
hellomyguys wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty normal for people to look at the evidence and be able to decide if someone was guilty or not. If someone is on video shooting someone, it is a bit silly to say "Why are you editorializing their presumed guilt in this matter."

Kyle Rittenhouse would like a word with you.

In this case, "guilty" is the word that can take on different forms, unless you're saying that a video of Rittenhouse shooting someone is not showing him shooting someone. He still took a life, whether or not that was felonious, excusable, justifiable, or praiseworthy, to use Ambrose Bierce's quip.

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

#834

Post by donkarma »

mmh0000 wrote: post #504

More people needs to learn about CoinJoins[0]. "CoinJoin is a trustless method for combining multiple Bitcoin payments from multiple spenders into a single transaction to make it more difficult for outside parties to determine which spender paid which recipient or recipients. Unlike many other privacy solutions, coinjoin transactions do not require a modification to the bitcoin protocol." [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wi…

unfortunate username for gmaxwell

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

#835

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

NationalPark wrote: post #325
mardifoufs wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why the criminal justice system operates like that though. The system has been designed like that because it turned that it is a very good idea not to go on witch hunts or to assume guilt if you want a functional society. I'm not defending the person involved here, but it's important to remember that the presumption of innocence isn't just an abstract legal concept instead of a very important part of…

Surely the important distinction here is that the state has the power to imprison or execute people. In our day to day lives, we frequently make decisions based on things not proved to that standard, such as in job interviews or on dates. Presumption of innocence is very much an abstract legal contrivance, though it's insightful to see in what cases people suddenly decide it needs to be applied outside that realm.

ask Lindy Chamberlain

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

#836

Post by jrochkind1 »

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/

> On a LinkedIn page that appears to belong to Morgan, however, she is listed as a partner at Demandpath, a “boutique micro-fund investing” firm. A LinkedIn profile seemingly belonging to Lichtenstein also places him at Demandpath. Prior to that, he’s described on Crunchbase as a founder of the advertising research startup MixRank, which was incubated at Y Combinator and raised more than $1.5 million in funding from Mark Cuban and other venture capitalists. (Lichtenstein is nowhere to be found on MixRank’s website.) Neither Demandpath nor MixRank responded to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

> Cuban told BuzzFeed News his last email exchange with Lichtenstein was in 2012. “I also found an email saying he left MixRank 6 years ago. That’s the extent of what I know about the guy,” Cuban said.

> Y Combinator did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

— https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sarahemerson/crypto-lau...

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

#837

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #417
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. On a value system with an inherently public ledger that eventually has to hit a fiat off ramp with KYC/AML requirements? Nah. Everyone has quality opsec until they don't, and the record of your criminal activity is immutable and highly durable.

Suppose he deposited it into AlphaBay and then withdrew from AlphaBay, and FBI didn't seize AlphaBay's logs. Where is the criminal immutable durable record now? There is no proof of connection between incoming and outgoing coins. Same principle with mixers.

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

#838

Post by birracerveza »

initplus wrote: post #484
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the government trying to enforce their opinion of who should own those Bitcoins, thereby taking power away from the owner that the network has decided on, which would be "whoever has the cryptographic keys". I really don't understand these arguments. The law still applies whether or not you use cryptocurrency. Using cryptocurrency doesn't free someone from the consequences of their actions. Illegal acts are st…

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?

You can trust the current government (maybe), but certainly not future ones, in which case we do need a distributed, trustless system.

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

#839

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

ctvo wrote: post #13
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…

> ...Lichtenstein Email 2 was held at a U.S.-based provider that offered email as well as cloud storage services, among other products. Reads suspiciously like Gmail. Oh no. You stored your keys weakly encrypted on Google Drive?!

I doubt it was weakly encrypted. But FBI has non-brute force decryption methods at their disposal.

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

#840

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

SirYandi wrote: post #564
GekkePrutser wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Such hacking prowess. Such bad opsec. Weird. Ps not condoning the theft but I just find it strange that people with the skills to steal this much get caught using bog standard cloud storage. You'd think they could afford something better ;) Something along the lines of "you don't take notes on a criminal f** conspiracy" :)

The article mentioned they were not thought to have conducted the hack itself.

That's just author's speculation. Most probably he did conduct the hack himself, because he had private keys to all the original withdrawal addresses.
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