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DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

cnbc.com

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Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#141

Post by lazide »

h33t-l4x0r wrote: post #140
lazide wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the victims get their money back it would only account for 25% or so because the price of BTC has moved so far since they lost it. (I think many victims will successfully petition for their money back)

In theory the court should give them back the actual bitcoin, not the monetary equivalent at the time. In a just world, anyway.

Based on current judicial trends, they’ll probably get Coinbase coupons worth 50% of a different coin or something.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#142

Post by h33t-l4x0r »

jowea wrote: post #130
greenchair wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a pretty naive view of war. we are at war with many countries all the time, most of it is cold.

Maybe we should call it "conflict", and include non-state actors.

Let's go with macro-aggressions and put trigger warnings on them

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#143

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

advisedwang wrote: post #8
hansonkd wrote: post #6

So in these cases of government seizing bitcoin, the people they seize from have unencrypted private keys? The article just says "private keys the defendant had in his possession" does this mean he was holding onto private keys that had no passwords / encryption at all that unlocked $15B? Or does the government have an alternative way of "seizing" bitcoin? I remember years ago people throwing around conspiracy theori…

The forfeiture complaint [1] says: > Chen personally maintained records of the wallet addresses and seed phrases associated with the private keys for each. So he wrote the passwords down, basically. [1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.53...

Where did he write the passwords that the us govt. seized them exactly?

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#144

Post by Jolter »

lurk2 wrote: post #131
phatfish wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)."

> the UK was enabling this guy before he got too much heat. How does this quote indicate that the UK was enabling Zhi?

Presumably GP means enabling by not seizing him or his assets earlier? Which I find to be a bit of a stretch.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#145

Post by Jolter »

vkou wrote: post #99
Reason077 wrote: post #62

Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.

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?

Criminals can’t count on #1 if they hold the keys on them when they get arrested.

>were previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession. Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#146

Post by JonChesterfield »

The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense.

We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#147

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Reason077 wrote: post #62

Wow. $15 billion is an astronomical, nearly unfathomable amount of money in Cambodia. This must have been a huge operation. It's almost 1/3 of the country's entire GDP! Well done DOJ. Hopefully the victims get their money back.

Compared to Cambodia, sure, but it's an international crime gang, with this particular one being just one branch. I wonder if this was their biggest hoard or if they had more?

Really poor financial management to have all that money concentrated that much though. It either means they dropped the ball bigly, or this is spare change for them... although Bitcoin's market cap is $2.24 trillion at the moment, $15 billion is a significant chunk of that.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#148

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mrtksn wrote: post #111

It's 127,271 Bitcoins. Interesting choice not to mention the number of Bitcoins but use its current market value in USD. I feel like this says something about Bitcoin but not sure what exactly. Edit: Wow, people really don't want to know how many Bitcoins were seized :)

This is why crypto could never be considered a currency, even the earliest news about BTC (value, theft, pizza purchases, etc) was always reported in USD values.

But then again, so do big Eve Online battles.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#149

Post by mlnj »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #146

The point of bitcoin was that it can't be taken off you by the state. So either this was severe user error, to the tune of why aren't the keys somewhere secure when there's a billion dollars behind them, or the nominal reason for bitcoin existing is nonsense. We thinking user error or crypto is nonsense? On the forum I expect the former.

Reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

With bitcoin you can't even just rely on memory for the keys, you need something physical that can be taken away from you.

Re: DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia

#150

Post by CaptainOfCoit »

postexitus wrote: post #117
xnx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Probably not, but we should probably not compare a total (potentially across years) with something that is measured yearly like GDP, kind of misleading.
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