51–60 of 421 posts
Would these money be returned to the victims?
Why would the government bother prosecuting/seizing it if the money was going to the victims?
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Direct link to the indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-i... Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group > The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current…
> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
the economy is not that big to start with :)
GDP $49.8 Billion (nominal; 2025)
Some examples
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/cambodia...
Criminal podcast shared the story of one of the forced workers at scamming camp in Myanmar: https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-332-the-compound-9-12-202...
Do they force you to reveal your private keys? After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Ars Technica: "Adding further mystery, it’s unknown how federal officials managed to obtain the cryptographic keys required to seize the funds from Zhi." My assumption is that at this point they just have orders from a judge allowing them to do it and they will find the means later.
Allowing them to do what? The feds are saying they already have the keys, so either they are lying, or they already had the means to get the keys. Which would be the juicy part of the story.
> Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
> The defendant and his co-conspirators subsequently used some of the criminal proceeds for luxury travel and entertainment and to make extravagant purchases such as watches, yachts, private jets, vacation homes, high-end collectables, and rare artwork, including a Picasso painting purchased through an auction house in New York City.
My guess some of defendants were in New York or around the US. You can be a criminal master mind and also be a complete f*king idiot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Direct link to the indictment https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-i... Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos This one of the other organizations / major bank used for money laundering directly linked to Hun Sen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huione_Group > The company is linked to Cambodia's ruling Hun family, which includes the current…
> Cambodia's specifically 30-50% of the economy can be directly attributed to scamming plus casinos Are you saying that 30-50% of Cambodia's economy can be directly attributed to scamming and casinos? I find that shocking and hard to believe. Do you have a source for that statement?
Do they force you to reveal your private keys? After obtaining the bitcoins, are they forced to sell it immediately? How does this affect the market?
> Once they did, however, the marshals fell back on standard procedure, preparing to handle the Bitcoin the same way they would a coke smuggler’s speedboat: by auctioning it off. That posed challenges because of the sheer size of the seizure—about 175,000 Bitcoins, or 2% of all the Bitcoin in circulation at the time. According to a prosecutor familiar with the case, the marshals opted for a staggered series of auctions to avoid crashing Bitcoin’s price. In four auctions between June 2014 and November 2015, the marshals sold the Silk Road Bitcoins for an average price of $379. (https://fortune.com/crypto/2018/02/21/government-forfeiture-...)
There were also some bitcoins seized from a hacker that stole them from Silk Road in 2013, and when they seized it in 2020 it was worth $1B, now it's worth $6.5B. Nice profit for the government. https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/01/09/federal-government-all...
So apparently the FBI or other US agency hacked this guy and drained his wallets? No indication he’s been arrested, wallets said to be unhosted. Clearly should’ve used an offline wallet lol.
tl;dr: Someone cracked these weak entropy wallets 3+ years before anyone else and kept it secret
Whether that was the USG or another entity has yet to be revealed