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18 Comments

$7.5B in stolen Bitcoin moves for the first time in 5 years

  1. 6

    Pretty fascinating to see someone trying to launder $7.5B 🤯

    Let's assume it's one person behind all of this. I can't imagine they can ever get all of this money into real cash, or even keep it as Bitcoin and spend it on themselves, because everything is traceable on the blockchain.

    One strategy that could seemingly work would be to transfer small amounts to thousands of random accounts. So if the hacker has one account, he could transfer $5M to 1500 accounts, one of which is theirs, and 1499 of which belong to innocent people.

    1. 4

      I think anyone with that amount of bitcoin could slightly manipulate/influence the market price making huge gains on trading platforms.

      1. 1

        The daily USD trading volume is only around 1B so pretty sure they could manipulate the price. Probably crash the market if they really wanted! There just isn't enough traded $USD to cover all that.

    2. 2

      I think you have to try if you have 7.5 billion

    3. 1

      He can move the funds to privacy focused blockchain. Monero/Beam/etc. Some better than others at hiding the trail.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 1

          Some coins are better for anonymity (and laundering), like Monero.

          1. 1

            Yeah, really depends on the blockchain.

            There are hundreds of different blockchains and a bunch that focus on privacy. A few more here:
            https://medium.com/shapeshift-stories/what-are-privacy-coins-6df8622ebf76

            And even chains like Ethereum have people working to add privacy features with things like zkSnarks.

    4. 1

      super-fascinating.

  2. 2

    Lol you’d need a Money Heist type of operation to move and clean this amount of money

  3. 1

    How the hell do you cash out that amount of money. I mean, they probably started to move since Bitcoin’s price exploded this year, but anyway I still don't get how they are planning to get their money out, because it's not that hard to track cryptocurrency and especially bitcoin https://freebitco.in/site/bitcoin/ . I think it’s not that much of an issue today because today we have decent blockchains that provide all the privacy needed and the whole crypto world evolved into a huge market. In my opinion, crypto is the future and in a decade or more we will switch to cryptocurrency since it is easier to transfer and hold. You can just control your finances the way you want. All we need is more privacy and safety for us to achieve that.

  4. 1

    Geeze... that's just effing crazy.

  5. 1

    NFTs incoming… 😂

  6. 1

    In 2017 Bulgarian government seized 200 000 Bitcoins and yet no one knows where they are...
    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.investopedia.com/amp/news/which-governments-are-hoarding-bitcoin/

  7. 1

    interesting. I would expect that you move portions to new wallets that swap into other tokens. Then sell OTC or exchanges that don't have KYC or even acquire NFTs between accounts.

  8. 1

    It's going to be very interesting to see how they try to clean the coins. I don't know that much about BC, but would they be able to do sth like break the money up into a bunch of small chunks and run each chunk through a bunch of tumblers to obfuscate the trail?

    1. 1

      Definitely.

      Move tiny portions at the time into DeX’es, where KYC isn’t a requirement to exchange it for something “untraceable” like Monero or ZCash.

      I think they will like their chances of getting out of this home free, with enough to never have to think about money ever again.

    2. 1

      That would be interesting to see. Especially since we know it was finally moved.

      Such an interesting case.

  9. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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