Cryptocurrency laundryman gets hung out to dry The operator of the world's longest-running Bitcoin money laundering service faces a 50-year prison sentence after being found guilty in a US court. Roman Sterlingov, 35, operated Bitcoin Fog, a service that was used by cybercriminals of various flavors to hide their digital tracks when using cryptocurrency as part of their …
I always kind of wondered about that. Why is bitcoin so beloved by online scammers when there's the ability to trace every transaction built right into the "currency" itself. Seems like it would make it easy to see where the "money" is flowing. I just never really cared enough to look into it on my own, so thanks El Reg for satisfying a minor curiosity of mine.
Because there's no government having much control over bitcoin itself, and criminals thought that meant "untraceable". The actual tracing is quite a bit more technical than required for tracking bank transactions, which convinced some of them, since "they" couldn't trace the transaction, no one else could.
The only difficulty is in tying a wallet address to a real-world individual. You can obviously do that at an exchange where they are switching to/from real money.
If you are cashing out crypto that has come from a tumbler service, then it is very likely that you are cashing out the proceeds of crime. The only difficulty is figuring out which crime they are the proceeds of, but they can do other forms of investigation to figure that out.
such as people looking to hide their finances from the oppressive regimes they live under and those who just want to make legal transactions anonymously.
Like making campaign contributions which would be legally required to be declared, avoiding legally legitimate child support and divorce payments, moving money away from creditors before your company goes bust, moving money around so the tax dept can't easily follow it....
Yeah there are lots of uses for things that are "legal" quite apart from trading drugs and ransoms.
Nothing that's not at a bare minimum utterly dishonest.
When I made a bitcoin donation to wikileaks I ran it through bitcoin fog first. Nothing dishonest about that, just nobody else’s business.
I wish I was stubborn enough to use cash more. I hate that every purchase I make is logged by multiple private companies and probably government departments. I’m not doing anything of interest so why should I be tracked. Makes me feel very uncomfortable.
Reminds me of a colleague who refused to pay motorway tolls with a credit card because "they" would know where he'd been. He could never explain who "they" were, nor why he thought anyone would care where he'd been.
Incidentally, paper cash usually has unique serial numbers, so is also very traceable.
"The operator of the world's longest-running Bitcoin money laundering service faces a 50-year prison sentence after being found guilty in a US court."
Seems to me that if you must try your hand at international crime, the first priority must be to make sure that there is no possibility of being sentenced in the land of the free.
-A.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
