131–140 of 421 posts
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An example of a legal one is the UK
Unsurprisingly the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat. From a BBC article: "The UK government says it has frozen assets owned by his network, including 19 properties in London - one of which is worth nearly £100m ($133m)."
How does this quote indicate that the UK was enabling Zhi?
I had never heard of "pig butchering". > The practice is called “pig butchering” because scammers deliberately build up trust and emotionally manipulate victims over an extended period—much like fattening up a pig—before ultimately stealing as much money as possible in a final act of financial “slaughter”
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Wait, hold on, I thought the promise of crypto was that: 1. The feds can't take your money. 2. Once your money's gone, it's gone. If criminals can't count on #1 holding true, and their victims can't count on #2 holding true, what is even the point of it?
They used the forbidden technique of 5€ wrench.
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> 1/3 of the country's entire GDP $15 billion is a huge number to be sure, but it's unclear from the article how many years it took to acquire.
So should we praise the gang's money saving habits?
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Had they thought $1B was enough they would have missed out on $14B.
I think the implication is they could have stayed under the radar and still have that $1B.
In a way it's like with an overfunded startup: when at some point in time the music stops because even the last would-be investor realized that the business will never be profitable, the company collapses. But all those paychecks received for playing with Other People's Money don't magically return.
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Well you could just reverse all the transactions. But they probably won't do that.
not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent.
Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.
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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.
> they already had the means to get the keys. Yes, and the other big questions are how they even know about the existence of the bitcoin and then how they were able to demonstrate sufficient probable cause to a judge that A) the bitcoin belongs to the suspect, and B) this bitcoin is the direct proceeds of the charged crimes. Given the extremely unusual circumstances around this seizure, its unprecedented size and the…
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The victims getting their money back would defeat the whole purpose of Bitcoin. No one knows who originally owned it. How about cash it out and trickle it down to us... or is all that just gonna magically disappear?
Surely it would be possible for victims to come forward and provide a paper trail of WhatsApp transcripts and blockchain transactions.
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their business is scam center that by definition is not counted by GDP anyway
That’s not necessarily true, though may be for Cambodia. GDP can include black market activities but countries differ in whether they include specific ones and how.
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not really? presumably many people transfer via platforms like Coinbase that use a shared wallet system. You can't just "send the money back where it came from" as those wallets might not actually be controlled by the funds owner.
Coin base keeps transaction logs. Unless this went through a mixer, Bitcoin is quite transparent. Still easier to just transfer it all to the Treasury of course and screw the victims which is probably what will happen.