Greek police arrest chap accused of laundering $4bn of Bitcoin Police in Greece have arrested a Russian national they accuse of running the BTC-e Bitcoin exchange to launder more than US$4bn worth of the cryptocurrency. According to Greek language news outlet the Daily Thess, FBI agents tracked 38-year-old Alexander Vinnik for more than a year before his arrest. Another local outlet, …
The thing is with that $4 beeeeelion its headline grabbing crap. The $4 billion is the incorrectly estimated value of all the bitcoin that has entered BTC-e at half the current days value. So the 1000's of bitcoins that were transferred in 2011 at a value of what $5 each are counted as having a value of ~$1200 each. Also all of that money wasn't being laundered, it was people using the exchange, selling their bitcoins. In the warrant only around $200000 is actually mentioned with specific transfers.
What they are getting him for really is running an unregistered exchange / money transfer company that accepted money from the US. Which if you go into technicalities, they never did, BTC-e didn't accept direct money transfers only money from transfer companies, or the dodgy part a shell company account.
If this person is guilty of helping launder stolen funds from Mt. Gox, I'd say he's guilty of a serious crime. If all this is true, then he should be tried SOMEWHERE, should he not? If I live in Bulgaria and write ransomware and steal money from people in, say Brazil, Mexico, the U.S.A. and Canada, what should happen to me? Who prosecutes me? Anyone? No one?
The problem is we don't really have any worldwide laws about this kind of thing or worldwide justice system where these miscreants could be tried and punished. Perhaps the world should start putting together some sort of mechanism like that? Until that happens, it's a case of whichever nation wants to step up and try to apprehend and punish the guilty, sort of international vigilante justice. The U.S. tends to do that more than most, so we get a lot of criticism. Other than just ignoring the crimes, what's the alternative right now, until some international system is in place?
I had some money in that exchange (a little under one bitcoin). I suppose it's gone for good, more likely than not. Seems very unfair that the FBI was following this guy for a year and did nothing to warn customers. I had no reason to believe they were involved in anything criminal. Not sure if the feds shut it down or what, but it's currently "under maintenance", I hardly think that's a coincidence.
I had money in there too, my theory is, after he was arrested the other admins shut down the site, took backups and wiped the servers. They are now setting up a new location. They also moved all the cryptos to other wallets so that the fbi couldn't get access to them. Not sure about the bank accounts. That is if they do come back in 5-10 days. Or they have given the fbi access to the servers for info gathering. If the FBI had taken it down I would think it would have an FBI seisure notice on it.
ProShares, the issuer of exchange-traded funds with around $65 billion under management, has launched the first short Bitcoin exchange-traded product in the US, offering a way for investors to make money from the ongoing cryptocurrency meltdown.
Dubbed the ProShares Short Bitcoin Strategy, the ETF is set to launch on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BITI. Bitcoin declined to $17,601.58 over the weekend, according to Coin Metrics. It has lost 70 percent of its value since last November's highs.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Nate Geraci, president of wealth management firm The ETF Store, said there would be "a rather robust market" for the short funds.
The cryptocurrency world is experiencing what can only be described as a meltdown, with prices plummeting today to lows not seen since the end of 2020.
The plunge is likely due to several factors including general economic uncertainty as seen in the stock market, inflation, bearish conditions and loss of confidence in crypto-coins, and scared money and bots being spooked by whales selling.
It definitely did not help that crypto-lending biz Celsius Network put a freeze on withdrawals, swaps, and transfers Sunday night. Soon after Bitcoin tumbled 10 percent, Ethereum lost 19 percent of its value, and fan-favorite Dogecoin shed nearly 15 percent of its value, or about $0.01, since then.
Comment Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has declared that "expensive digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely."
He was joking, obviously, though considering Gates's supposed connection to microchips in vaccines, one can never be too careful. What he's talking about are non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which came up at a TechCrunch event in Berkeley, California, on Tuesday. Specifically the Bored Ape Yacht Club variety.
You know those kids' books where the picture is divided into three (head, body, legs) so you can turn different sets of pages to get a different image? That's what the Bored Ape Yacht Club is for those willingly parted from large amounts of money for the right to stand next to a picture of a cartoon chimp.
A crew using malware that performs cryptomining and clipboard-hacking operations have made off with at least $1.7 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
The malware, dubbed Trojan.Clipminer, leverages the compute power of compromised systems to mine for cryptocurrency as well as identify crypto-wallet addresses in clipboard text and replace it to redirect transactions, according to researchers with Symantec's Threat Intelligence Team.
The first samples of the Windows malware appeared in January 2021 and began to accelerate in their spread the following month, the Symantec researchers wrote in a blog post this week. They also observed that there are several design similarities between Clipminer and KryptoCibule – another cryptomining trojan that, a few months before Clipminer hit the scene, was detected and written about by ESET analysts.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.
"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."
And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."
Coinbase has axed 1,100 employees, cutting its workforce by 18 per cent, while the value of digital assets including Bitcoin plummet amid rising inflation rates in the US.
CEO Brian Armstrong announced on Tuesday he was "making the difficult decision to reduce the size of [the] team ... to stay healthy during this economic downturn." As the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase employed about 1,250 employees at the start of 2021, when novel blockchain-based technologies such as NFTs and stablecoins exploded, launching the current Web3 hype to new heights.
But the glowing promise of getting rich from trading cryptocurrencies or cartoon apes is losing its shine, spelling bad news for Coinbase. Armstrong warned of a "crypto winter" as America looks set to enter a recession.
Decentralized finance lending platform Solend tried to fend off the effects of the crypto meltdown at the weekend when 97.5 percent of its users voted to give it emergency powers to liquidate its largest customer account. A second vote held today reversed the first.
China's ban on cryptocurrency mining – and general dislike of any form of blockchain-based assets – has seen web giant Tencent clamp down on discussion of the subjects on its massive WeChat and Weixin messaging platforms.
News of Tencent's policy can be found in recent amendments to its terms of service which last week added a section about cryptocurrency and NFTs.
The added verbiage states that accounts engaged in discussion of crypto trading, exchange between bit-bucks and real money, or provision of pricing services for digital currencies, all need to stop it.
Japan's parliament has passed legislation allowing Yen-linked stablecoin cryptocurrencies, thus becoming one of the first countries – and by far the largest economy – to regulate a form of non-fiat digital money.
The regulations stipulate that only banks and other registered financial institutions – like money transfer agents and trust companies – can issue the alterna-cash. Intermediaries, or those who are responsible for the circulation of the currencies, will be required to adopt stricter anti-money-laundering measures. The rules also define stablecoins as digital money and guarantee face value redemption.
Japan's Financial Services Agency (FSA) floated this regime in a March 2021 proposal. Parliamentary assent for the proposal means it will come into effect in 2023. The regulations will apply to domestic financial institutions as well as foreign operations that target Japanese users. The research material supporting the decision relied heavily on trends in the US and Europe.
The Russian-based Evil Corp is jumping from one malware strain to another in hopes of evading sanctions placed on it by the US government in 2019.
You might be wondering why cyberextortionists in the Land of Putin give a bit flip about US sanctions: as we understand it, the sanctions mean anyone doing business with or handling transactions for gang will face the wrath of Uncle Sam. Evil Corp is therefore radioactive, few will want to interact with it, and the group has to shift its appearance and operations to keep its income flowing.
As such, Evil Corp – which made its bones targeting the financial sector with the Dridex malware it developed – is now using off-the-shelf ransomware, most recently the LockBit ransomware-as-a-service, to cover its tracks and make it easier to get the ransoms they demand from victims paid, according to a report this week out of Mandiant.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
