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NHS Digital stopped short of advising against paying off WannaCrypt

Lee D Silver badge

Unlikely, given that nobody has spent the Bitcoin ransoms that were collected.

Yeah, that "anonymous" network? You can trace every payment from every wallet out to every endpoint, by just visiting one of the thousands of blockchain info websites.

Sure, if you break it down into enough pieces and "launder" it through enough genuine transactions, people will lose track. But at the moment, a lot of money is sitting in a BitCoin account that nobody has dared touch.

Because the second you touch it, every Bitcoin exchange is going to be tracking it and refusing to deal with it's products, most likely.

And if you're not being paid, or being paid a pittance (nothing compared to 20 years in the slammer, for instance), or being paid into an account you daren't touch.... why would you send out anything so incriminating as a release code?

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