US indicts two over socially engineered $230M+ crypto heist Two individuals are in cuffs and facing serious charges in connection to a major theft of cryptocurrency worth more than $230 million from a single victim. Malone Lam, 20, and Jeandiel Serrano, 21, of Miami and Los Angeles respectively, are alleged to have carried out a scam between August and September and used the stolen …
You downvoters go wild, but there's something in this..
Firstly, I'm not a "to the moon" fanatic... it's noticeable every time the markets cough, crypto goes down, so it's not a store of value.
But, fucking hell, it makes cross border transactions easy. I used it to move a lot of money from one side of the world to the other, changing fiat currencies, and the whole process took about 5 minutes with a VERY competitive exchange rate. Family members in the room were stunned at the speed - they're used to 3 days with awful rates.
Maybe this just highlights how shite the big banks are (that's your employers, any banking IT chumps reading this), but wow crypto when used correctly is powerful.
Just trying to help you expand your little viewpoints... you're welcome.
You'll certainly appreciate how easily and quickly that money can be moved, when it belongs to your company or kid's school or local hospital one minute, converted to crypto and is funding North Korean nukes the next.
What a shame one of those big banks didn't query the transaction, but oh that takes time and money, which makes them shite doesn't it.
So, a few years ago convinced a young bloke who had a shit load of bitcoin, that he should pre-emptively pay the tax, and he did.
Anyway, after a few years it has been clarified that a lot was not needed to be paid, but it turns out that tax you paid and didn't have to, can be sold to someone who didn't pay tax when they should have, and now wishes to avoid the revenues swinging penalties.
After 5 years, it's turns out to be quite a nice return....
So the motto is "Pay tax and win!"
That used to be a common tax 'activity'
Start a private company with 100M shares.
Sell a share to your mate for £10 giving you a valuation.
Shove a stick certificate for 1million shares in the donation box of your nearest charity and you have a £10M tax deductible gift. You can sell the deduction to someone with real money and a real tax bill.
There were a bunch of stories of the local cats home asking how they owned millions of shares in Amalgamated Holdings Ltd (Bermuda) and how they could get the £M to spend on cat food.
I think you are missing the point - this is not a scam.
L (loser) fails to pay $10k he owes to the revenue man in 2015 (and someone realises this in 2024)
The revenue calculates 9 years compounding penalties on L, and asks for his first born's kidney.
W (winner) pays $10k more tax than he had to in 2015. The revenue owes him $10k.
W can either get a refund from the revenue, or he can sell the 10k dated 2015 to L, who can use it to pay his tax on the due date, and incur no penalties, as the revenue had the 10k they were owed in 2015 when it was due.
L will pay a nice premium for W's old 10k.
And if you believe that, I have a bridge I can sell you cheap. One owner, never been hit by a cargo ship.
Buying anything that has to be registered, titled or comes from a luxury shop is going to be tracked. If you've worked for a couple of years at a pound shop, buying a Lambo is going to be highly suspicious. First class tickets to a popular party spot will be noticed. I notice that many high dollar thefts of any sort get solved when the criminals can't contain their impulses and start spending more money than the entire crew of a naval ship during shore leave at a port of call. Want a sports car? Get one off the salvage lot cheap and send it to a shop to rebuild for you. I expect that's going to be way under the radar and the repair shop might even take some crypto in payment so there's less exposure translating it to real money. These people never have the patience to play the long game.
You know, I've often wondered about that:
Seeing as to the demography of people who regularly play the various lotteries and therefore someone from that eventually wins, do they have to jump through hoops?
Your average mouth-breathing yob suddenly walks into a luxury car dealership and wants to pay with cash - do they make them show a letter from the lottery agency and their bank, demonstrating that it's legit?
PS: just googled on the famous tale that most lottery winners end up broke and unhappy, but that seems to be an unproven story. The only real research took Swedish lottery winners who didn't win some massive jackpot, and found that 70% used it responsibly. Not sure if that's applicable to your average Aussie bogan suddenly winning the Powerball.
Most lotteries give the high-value winners some free financial advice, as it's really bad business for winners to regularly end up publicly bankrupt or killed in their new supercar.
The majority will follow at least some of the advice, as things like "arrange to pay off all your loans" are obvious no-brainers.
It's how most casinos stay in business.
Walk in with $ 'earned' from some strangely profitable business and walk out with 94.7% of it in the form of legally declarable winnings.
The local casinos here weren't even bothering to make you sit at a roulette table all night betting on black. They would take your money and give you 95% back while you entertained yourself in a comped room discussing business with an agreeable young lady.
Seeing as to the demography of people who regularly play the various lotteries and therefore someone from that eventually wins, do they have to jump through hoops?Your average mouth-breathing yob suddenly walks into a luxury car dealership and wants to pay with cash - do they make them show a letter from the lottery agency and their bank, demonstrating that it's legit?
Nope. Well, some relatively easily managed hoops. So depends on country, but the winnings might be taxable. If so, that might be deducted from the winnings, or winner might have to declare it and pay tax. Then it'd be down to the dealer, and the probability of someone wanting to pay for a $200k sports car with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Or I once bought a car* for 'cash', mainly to see what would happen. So shuffled some money into my current account and paid for it with my debit card. I'd pre-warned the bank that I was buying a car and all that happened was the bank phoned both me & the dealer to confirm the transaction. Dealer may have been moderately peeved they didn't get commission for flogging a finance deal, but it was a quick & painless experience.
AFAIK a lot of the hoops might be on the seller's side, ie reporting a potentially suspicious transaction. That could then be checked by TPTB and they'd know the person was a lottery winner. Dealer is covered, and as long as the money clears, they're probably happy.
*Not a $200k car, I hasten to add. I may be crazy, but I'm not that crazy. Plus I doubt my back would thank me after trying to fold & unfold myself into a supercar a few times. It's a little undignified scrabbling on the pavement to exit a low-slung exotic motor, along with the risks of maybe looking up at a police officer and being asked if I've been drinking. I think I'm built for comfort, not for speed these days.
I like the idea behind Bitcoin and other blockchain systems. It's an irrefutable public ledger. That's a really useful thing, whether you use to to record property deeds or Pokemon card trades.
The problem with crypto was that someone floated the idea that crypto transactions were anonymous. Every illegal market was immediately drawn to crypto because of this idea. What surprised me was how uninformed the crooks were to believe that a public ledger would afford any anonymity.
In the end, the crooks have ruined cryptocurrency. It promised to be a way to hold assets with a market price completely independently of any bank owned and regulated by a country. That's a great thing for personal autonomy and freedom. It's a way for people in very undemocratic countries to receive money without risking imprisonment. But now, it's just tainted and is single handedly responsible for enabling the rise of ransomware.
"What surprised me was how uninformed the crooks were to believe that a public ledger would afford any anonymity."
Straight out of the box, not so much privacy. The public ledger is recording a crypto wallet ID, not a named person. From there the bits need to be run through a few mixers hopefully run by somebody not keeping notes so the trail of ownership is muddled. Cash is still nicely anonymous and a cargo load of fertilizer or bulk raw material being sent from one country to another is as well.
How many times has Bitcoin been declared dead. Hey, there is a website for that!
https://www.bitcoindeaths.com/
Love it or hate it, but you cannot deny this story, and variations thereof, have been spoken before. In retrospect, would you seriously not spend $1.00 on Bitcoin the first time it was declared dead at 11 cents per coin in 2010? From that first article until now is a ~577,000x increase in value. Why do you think it would stop now?
With that size of haul, my first guess is a Saudi (or geographically nearby) hereditary power broker, for whom it was pocket money.
My second guess is some super duper, but sloppy, PAC which had just received that sum from a Saudi donor to fund upcoming election campaigns.
In any event, it's no surprise that Washington DC is awash in dark money.
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