Cybercrook hands cops £923k in Bitcoin made from selling phished deets on the dark web A hacker from Kent, England, has handed over almost a million quid in Bitcoin following a lengthy police investigation. Grant West, 27, of Ashcroft Caravan Park, Sheerness, made most of the money through phishing scams targeting companies and individuals around the world since 2015. He sold financial details on and stashed the …
Beginner's Luck, Kirsty?
The Cyber World is Complex to XSSXXXX. Not AI Terrain for Beginners to Struggle and Drown In. Does the Met require Advanced Virtual Assistance in such Live Operational Virtual Environment Matters .... Surreal ACTive Situations out on Not So Secret Manoeuvres that Driver the Presentation with Prime Premium Human Perception Capture?
Or simple new media programming with pirate and private public output to input would create a multi-headed Hydra to try slay and lay to waste. Televise the Presence of Prodigious Programmers with Almighty Systems Shenanigans being Tempered and Honed.
Have you read, or tried to read, Finnegans Wake?
It has been hypothesised that Joyce had schizophrenia (whereas bipolar disorder is perhaps more common with authors). I speculate that AMFM1 may either be an experimental text generator (feed in articles see what comes out) or schizophrenic. There is a more unlikely third possibility: that it's steganography being used to distribute covert messages, in which case it could be keywords or the capitals with surrounding text to make some sort of vague sense.
If I were in charge of The Register I'd block it on the offchance of the third possibility, but that probably just shows I'd be a terrible moderator.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Targeting rich/middle class white guys is stupid. The police will investigate that fully and you’ll get the thick end of the sentence.
If you want to get away with crime you need to be targeting the poor/non-whites/women. Much less risk as the state doesn’t seem to care as much.
If you’re rich, white and male it tends to help too. Don’t commit crime if you’re poor.
This person developed a long career out of being purely a criminal. The odds of him every being useful are slim.
He also had a large collection of stolen credit cards that he used for personal expenses. Elderly on small fixed incomes and families in financial hardship could end up worse than stabbed if they have trouble with the bank.
Financial crimes frequently affect far more people, at least as badly, as knife crimes.
Ask anyone who's had their pension stiffed - and ask the actuaries who do the sums in medical costs, etc on the stresses involved. Now multiply that out by a few hundred or a few thousand.
Don't forget with knife/gun/violent offences crimes most of the time the people involved are known to each other and have a long "history". Stuff involving 3rd parties tends to get much stiffer penalties.
"White collar" crime has historically been attractive due to the very low penalties involved if caught, regardless of the trail of mayhem and death that can happen in its wake.
One can argue that the effects of this kind of crime (it's a robbery spree, under any other guise) are so severe that 10 years before parole should be a STARTING point - and I know some prison systems where such crims would have to be put in isolation as the other prisoners would put two and two together about their granny being bilked by such people with shortened life expectancies resulting.
The problem with crime is that not only do you need to make it work and have plan(s) for when things inevitably go tits up, you also need a plan for laundering the proceeds.
Used to be a nice chap at the bookies who would pay you 110% of a winning bet, no questions asked. The local dealers we're all, on paper, extremely successful gamblers.
Funnily enough, I once knew a rather successful solicitor who, wishing to pay minimum tax, did something very similar (to be exact he took client payments in cash, went to the races, and only kept his winning tickets, plus any dropped by less ingenious punters. He was a pretty good judge of horses and odds, and it worked out quite well.)
One of his favourite techniques when there was a London derby (e.g. Spurs vs Chelsea) was to send a clerk to put money on the other side near one ground, while he did the same at the opposite one. Because bookies hedge their bets, he could get better odds in Tottenham betting on Chelsea, say, and could guarantee a profit.
If you want to launder money successfully, locate a bent accountant and a bent solicitor. The risk you run is that they'll talk you into investing in whatever scam they have cooked up between them.
"Because bookies hedge their bets"
<pedant> What they are doing is balancing their book, ensuring they make bank either way by taking bets. </pedant>
If a bookie was to actively place a bet to balance their book, it would certainly be them hedging. In practice if they are over exposed they tend to trade part of their book rather than place a bet. While in many ways the same thing, it's the difference between betting yourself, and betting on behalf of a friend.
"Funnily enough, I once knew a rather successful solicitor who, wishing to pay minimum tax, did something very similar"
IANAL, certainly not a tax one, but in most places this is tax evasion and illegal and probably not worth it. The reason money launders will use it is because they are already guilty of a typically more serious crime. Known criminals will use it in their tax returns because it provides a legal veneer, but it doesn't fool anyone.
Owning a cash heavy business and layering in the dodgy cash with the real stuff is safer. Anything selling fast food, coffee, booze or services. The other local legend was the "world's worst brothel", NZ having legal prostitution, where the extended family of the local boss were reporting their income as sex work, 8 hours a day, 6 days a week @$300 ph. All in cash. Adverts, listings etc, but if you tried to book, nothing doing.
Vague IT angle, I had one of my old IT service companies used for something similar, after it had gone through about three owners after me.
I have relatives there, though not close ones.
Sheppey resembles Phoenix, Az. in this; social class and height above sea level are actually associated. (It resembles Phoenix in virtually no other way). Minster is actually a couple of hundred feet above sea level. Most of the rest of it more closely resembles the Maldives, though without the weather.
Global warming, in fact, will eventually deal with both the sheep and the chav problem.
"£923k in Bitcoin, and he lives in a trailer park? "
Look up "Rathkeale Rovers" and you might understand more.
It's not a "trailer park" in the USAian sense. These are the nearest thing the UK has to Trump's "no go" zones - where the police usually only enter in large groups, with heavily armed backup and helicopter support.
"There sure are a lot of charges that seem to amount to "had weed, was probably going to sell it". Can you just throw drugs in somebody's shed and get them put away forever on ten different charges? Crazy."
Not quite, but in effect, yes. Well, charge them, the courts decide what happens afterwards.
A small amount of weed is generally deemed as for "personal use", will confiscated and you'll most likely get a caution. Once the amount in your possession is large enough to exceed what might be a normal amount for personal use, then you WILL be charged with "intent to supply".
Remember though, these are only charges made by the Police. What the CPS, and possibly a court will decide might well be something else. Having watched a few fly-on-the-wall Police shows, it seem quite a lot of "intent to supply" ends up as either a caution or no further action. This may mean the evidence was rubbish or the accused grassed up the next one up the chain.
"This may mean the evidence was rubbish or the accused grassed up the next one up the chain."
It can also mean the possessor is a heavy smoker and it really is for personal use. The police involved tend to charge "supply" as anything more than 16g or so (half an ounce) but a heavy smoker might burn through that in a weekend.
The CPS on the other hand have the history of the offender onhand as well as the amounts he's been caught with and access to bank, medical/social worker records and are better able to make the decision (because this WILL be raised a defence in court).
In any case if you really want to make a dent in the narcogangs then it has to be done by torpedoing their profits, which means treating addiction as a health problem, not a criminal one.
The gangs are in it for the MONEY - there are spectacular profits to be made and harsher punishments just mean higher profits, so that path isn't working unless the purchasers are taken out of the loop entirely - The purchasers are committing low level crimes to get money to feed their addiction.
It's a simple cost-benefit matter to work out that feeding addicts medically pure product is cheaper all round (knockout doses are less than a pound) and saves the complications caused by contaminated street drugs/needles/etc along with territory fights between gangs, removes the motivation to sell crack to schoolkiddies and gives the opportunity to possibly get victims off the addiction cycle (worth noting that addiction is usually caused by a shitty life situation, not the other way around, but they become self-feeding - see the Rat Park studies)
Switzerland and Portugal have BOTH seen marked drops in "petty" crime rates with this approach.
The "gateway" drug theory only holds water because the gateway is to the criminal dealer network, who want to get victims onto higher profit products.
"Can you just throw drugs in somebody's shed and get them put away forever on ten different charges? "
<pedant> No, because you don't get put away for a long time on charges, only on convictions </pedant>
Yes, in the sense that possession of certain substances over a certain weight can get you arrested and charged.
Yes, it can be used to fuck up someones life. Why beat a dude up, when you can plant an ounce and get the cops and the system to do it for you? Why kill someone, when 200g of coke/smack hidden in someones house and a tip off or favour from the cops doesn't get your hands even a little bloody.
You're also more likely to get done for possession if you happen to look more like a dealer, ef if: the drugs are already split into multiple amounts, or you've got hoards of empty baggies, or lots of loose cash, or you have scales etc. Probably multiple mobile phones would be a bad sign too.
Generally though the exact threshold would be down to how much you've pissed the police off, and how easy they think it would be to get a conviction.
So, you could try hiding multiple baggies of weed in someone's shed and then calling the cops, but the police might well guess that it's a stitch-up, and they'll be looking for you.
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