The priest, the coder, the Bitcoin drug deals – and today's guilty verdicts A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy. Their trial, which unfolded in a US district court in New York, exposed the murky world of illegal Bitcoin exchanges. Pastor Trevon Gross and Florida coder Yuri Lebedev helped launder Bitcoins …
"Once the price has risen, the scam operator dumps their stock and leaves investors with worthless shares."
"Moments before the price falls off a cliff, the hedge fund operator dumps their stock and leaves investors with worthless shares."
Sounds like the same thing, and it is. Only the criminality is hidden behind nice shiny office doors and a bored of directors. [sic]
I guess we know better now:
1) You are good to go with money laundering and stock market fraud, if you are a big company
2) You are a criminal doing money laundering and stock market fraud, if you are not a big company.
Too big to {fail|do time}. I see what's going on. Thanks for the tips!
A variation on this is to publish the hype in national newspaper, disguised as a stock tip and fill your boots in the same manner when your flock of readers piles in with their cash.
This version has the advantage that, when you're caught red-handed with the ill-gotten gains, you can claim that you were just following the tip advice in your own paper and have the columnists wot wrote it sent down instead of you.
Not exactly sure that I agree either is really a crime.
"Hey, John, this product is so fabulous you should buy shares!"
John does so.
Shares turn out to be worthless.
As far as I can see, John kinda deserved that by not doing his homework.
Now if they were fiddling the accounts, or putting out false sales figures to make the stock prices rise, that is indeed fraud.
But bigging up worthless shares? Not sure I see the problem with that. The only people hurt are those stupid enough to believe advertising.
The goal of bitcoin is laudable: Provide a digital equivalent to cash. The problem is, nobody wants cash. Cash isn't traceable. It comes and goes without surveillance. It's a manageable problem in the physical world, but in the electronic one, an action that may take seconds, minutes, or days to happen can happen millions of times in less than a second. Needless to say, law enforcement doesn't like that idea, and neither does anyone who wants to know about who's getting paid, for what, and where.
We're now in an era where there is a digital 'land grab' -- but for our private data. Everyone is selling to everyone else, trading around your viewing habits, buying habits, political orientation, sexual orientation, and if there were a pig-related orientation they'd track that too. Corporate and government interests have aligned here because they both want mostly the same information and benefit from its lack of protection. Unfortunately, that lack of protection legally carries over electronically.
Bitcoin provides a partial solution to part of that problem: It tries to obfusciate who's paying for what, breaking that chain. Which is precisely why both corporations and governments have been keen to kill it off. It's also why criminals use it. Which is unfortunate, because there are very many good uses for a digital currency for the average, law abiding, citizen. It's the same with Tor: Both block the bulk collection of data -- and the IETF has gone on record as saying pervasive surveillance is, in itself, an attack, irrespective of motivation.
It's the sad truth that the people most motivated to use these technologies are the ones with the most to gain by breaking that chain, and thus there has been a heavy push to criminalize or legislate-away the solutions; Using Tor is now "probable cause" for any search warrant, anywhere, ever. "They aren't giving up their juicy personal data -- THEY MUST BE CRIMINALS." We needed more average people to get in, but average people don't recognize the risks of the system, and so they aren't apt to start using new technology that would mitigate them.
And so it goes... another high profile bitcoin-related crime that has as much to do with 'bitcoin' as Jack Daniels does with drunk driving... which is to say, that bottle wasn't at the wheel when the car plowed down a bunch of people. And El Reg, like all the other media outlets, will throw a little more gas on the fire with this story to give corporations and governments justification for killing off a necessary thing. Mind you, Bitcoin isn't the solution we needed... it's just the one we have right now. Rather like the world governments... mostly they aren't something we want, and broken in so many ways, but... there they are.
Uhm, you do know what the blockchain is, right? It's literally a public ledger of who paid who how much. So if hiding that is what someone is after, Bitcoin is just about the worst choice.
Anyways - it sounds like coin.mx did absolutely nothing wrong, morally. Just Big Brother being upset that they did something he couldn't control...
"It's a public ledger, but determining who owns any specific address is tricky"
Yes, but once its known, every transaction that that account performed is now known. For large drug rings, all it'd take is for a single member to be compromised for the whole thing to fall apart (look at where they bought the goods from, then track who else also bought from that source).
Privacy is actually where cash excels and why the vast majority of illegal goods sales still take place with it rather than bitcoin.
Same for "priest". Pastor Trevon Gross isn't a priest, he's pastor at the Hope Cathedral, one of the fundamentalist churches that infests the US, mostly in the South.
So what you're saying is, he's ordained by a religious institution to lead the congregation, but that does not make him a priest?
What does he need to do to make "priest" with you? Do we only consider orthodox sky fairy worshippers to be priests?
The fact that Bitcoin was involved here makes little difference; it simply happened to be the currency used to enter into the transactions. It didn't provide so much obfuscation that law enforcement was unable to bring the case to court. Using Bitcoin in the title just sensationalizes the whole thing.
The pastor, as has been rightly pointed out, was/is not a priest, and from the article, it is impossible to say whether he was truly an ordained minister or some self-proclaimed purveyor of <fill in the blank>.
Ho-hum. The good news is that another bunch of stupid miscreants got their just desserts.
Stock market analogy? I think not. The fact that it may be harder to prove intent with pump & dump schemes does not legitimize them in any way.
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What makes a pastor not a priest?
Genuine question, as I'd tend to use the word 'priest' to cover all types of organised religious types. Yes this one seems to have got his religious qualifications from the god equivalent of trump university, but personally I can't see much difference between that and however priests are usually trained.
Mind you, most of my knowledge of priests comes from Father Ted...
Let Me Google That For You:
"define priest" => "an ordained minister of the Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican Church, authorized to perform certain rites and administer certain sacraments."
"define pastor" => "a minister in charge of a Christian church or congregation, especially in some non-episcopal churches."
So a priest is a pastor, but a pastor may not be a priest.
Ahh, I've more heard it used in sense [1.1] "A person who performs religious ceremonies and duties in a non-Christian religion", so together with the first definition, for me "priest" == "holy person", which could be anyone from a shaman to the pope.
We have, as a civilization, built up a set of laws and rules about how things like stock markets, money lending, etc, should work. It is not perfect, but it does work. Without it, life as you know it would not exist.
Some of the commenters here seem to feel that any thing organized is designed to rip them off. And bitcoin and Tor are completely white as driven snow. Because it fits the uncomplicated, unbalanced views they hold dear.
It would be interesting to see how many bitcoin operations are actually criminal in basis. As in, drugs, or things like card skimmers, or ransomware payoffs, and so on. Personally, I suspect a very large percentage of the transactions are related to that.
So the question is, does the nirvana that Tor and bitcoin are supposed to help create actually exist, or is that nirvana really total criminal anarchy? I personally have not seen any of the nirvana created, but I have seen an awful lot of criminal activity.
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