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The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

wsj.com

211–220 of 243 posts

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#211
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That covers you publishing software. It doesn’t cover providing a service to criminals and personally profiting from it, and the constitution definitely gives the government authority to police that so it’s going to come down to how well they can prove that those guys were going more than just releasing code.

The tornado cash smart contracts simply encrypt your transaction. When you use it you are not profiting off of it. It would be akin to banning. The use of communication encryption protocol period this is completely unprecedented in the US.

That's not accurate: my choice to encrypt a message does not directly assist you in committing a crime but that is unavoidably true for using a mixer. The guy who was arrested wasn't just arrested because he released something on GitHub but because he operates a service with North Korea used to launder money and received payment for it, and it's the operations part which brings the most risk — that service isn't complying with legal requirements for record keeping and since it's not free to use, that means that there's a transaction record showing the operators receiving a non-trivial sum of money from a criminal group.

That last part is potentially defensible – bankers aren't charged just because a criminal stores money in a checking account – except that each KYC law not followed is not only its own offense but also a chance for prosecutors to argue that the decision not to do so was intentional and the operators knew their service was predominantly used by criminals. That's going to be an interesting case with potentially significant implications for the entire field.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#212
post #19

Say it with me: "Bitcoin is not, and never was, anonymous."

But used as intended (not via a KYC exchange) it is pseudonymous, right?

It took 8 years for this high profile guy to be caught because he comingled funds in 2020

This article is not the investigative epiphany that it thinks it is

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#213
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part IMO? That the suitcase of cash didn’t work.

> The worst part IMO? That the suitcase of cash didn’t work. As a parent of young men, I'm glad it didn't work. IMHO it would have been bad for the character development of both parties.

Its silly he lacks this much awareness, it reads like he just wanted to be rid of the burden because he can’t figure anything social out

People don’t even need actual bitcoin, they just leave their phone wallet open on a watch address while they “go to the bathroom” on a date, and let their nosy date take the bait and watch the tune change in real time

Money still overrides other preferences and exacerbates poor character development across genders, it just means his way was so bad…. Carrying around suitcases wow.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#214

Zhong was caught because he made basic operational security errors, like address reuse (which is how he was caught by linking fraud wallet to exchange wallet) , static IP, using a KYC exchange in 2017 to convert BCH into BTC, etc. Not because Bitcoin was cracked. After being caught, Zhong voluntarily relinquished his passwords to encrypted wallets and other bitcoin, not that the crypto was cracked. I wonder how the f…

> he was caught by linking fraud wallet to exchange wallet How are you supposed to turn fraudulently obtained btc into dollars without doing that?

He did it for 8 years and even this FBI puff piece relied on an activity in 2020 that has nothing to do with the prior 8 years of cashing out

Nothing about this article suggests any breakthrough in investigative capabilities, it’s pretty embarrassing actually

The government got lucky that someone was trying to get rid of something they found to be a burden in their lives

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#215
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume people involved in this sort of activity would convert to Monero first (can be done without KYC in a 100 different places). Then they would go to localmonero or a site like it and select cash in the mail. They would round to the nearest XMR at a time when transacting on localmonero so that even if the exchangers they used were compromised the government wouldn't be able to link them to the initial BTC->XMR s…

Not at this scale. You can do many transactions in the way that you describe and perhaps withdraw a million dollars, but you can't launder a billion dollars this way.

rolls eyes

Not at once

He was doing it over 6 years no problem

You don’t need a billion, you need a few million and he got that and it wasn’t even part of the investigation or why he got caught

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mixers, privacy chains, and ZK privacy schemes Does any of this stuff actually help bypass KYC requirements for legal offramps in developed countries?

Probably not. I believe exchanges are meant to block transactions of tainted coins. And using a mixer immediately marks the coins as tainted.

I haven’t really used any of them, but my belief is that the USG wouldn’t have sanctioned TornadoCash if it didn’t work.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what the third wallet does. If the first wallet is tainted, anybody can just look to see what destination wallets it sends to and follow the trail. Adding an extra wallet doesn’t help.

It is not about obscuring the trail. It makes it harder to establish probable cause he orchestrated the fraud.

That doesn’t wash. Once the feds know who he is, he’s 99% of the way to fucked.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#218
post #19

Say it with me: "Bitcoin is not, and never was, anonymous."

The idea of using Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for anything always seemed insane to me. I don't want my info about payments I've made to be public, espcially not in a form where, by design, it will never disappear!

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#219
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a felony to use Tornado Cash now. And the government interprets sanctions law extraterritorially so you're not safe in other countries either.

> And the government interprets sanctions law extraterritorially so you're not safe in other countries either. It does not; these sanctions only apply to US Persons. Secondary sanctions mean that the Treasury can additional designate non US-Persons for breaches of the primary sanctions, but that is a heavy-handed tool and unlikely to happen to people who merely use Tornado Cash; regardless, no law was broken by such…

Turkish guy accused of violating sanctions on Iran (no US bank account, only US nexus was that some of the banks he used had correspondent accounts with New York banks): https://www.paulhastings.com/insights/client-alerts/united-s...

Lebanese man extradited from Morocco for violating sanctions on himself (!): see ruling justifying this on https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-tajideen-1

It is trivial for the government to say that you directly or indirectly used some service operated by American company and therefore you are subject to American jurisdiction. Yes it’s unlikely to happen to any small time Tornado Cash user.

Re: The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

#220
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the point he's heisted several billion dollars of bitcoin (or anything really), I think it's a bit late to be worrying about that.

The other person didn't.

Good point! The baggage is never just what’s in the suitcase (or just the cash, as it were), and (to be serious) glad the other person saw that too. The unimaginable degree of shit that they would be accepting if they took it would be mind boggling.

My guess is that because the other party is not the type of person who would have sex for even a suitcase of cash with them, is why the perp wanted them so much they tried a suitcase of cash.

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