Apparently has been missing throughout the court cases for the last year. It was a default judgement. Kind of annoying trying to dig up that info the internet; there's a million websites out there all in line to clog up search engines with the same limited facts. They need to cluster them by content or something.

Even in the days before crypto, scammers could hide money in other ways. They need to catch him.

I suspect they won't catch him. Building a new identity isn't really that hard, especially since the guy has had some time to do it, and (I assume) money to pay for it.

> Building a new identity isn't really that hard

No. But he will have effectively given up all his known wallets. If he touches them, he’ll have lit himself up.

Crypto is quite easy to launder in a practical sense, and he can go to Russia or China and live freely.

Then they know he's still alive but not his new identity?

Would a "grey" crypto market refuse to trade (some) of the coins into another less traceable crypto?

> Would a "grey" crypto market refuse to trade (some) of the coins into another less traceable crypto?

No, but every wallet it touched would be flagged by AML software, making it ineligible for e.g. sale to an institution or deposit at Coinbase. That reduces its value, albeit not to zero.

This can't possibly be correct. You can send BTC to anyone without their consent. So you're saying that if he was to use a mixer to clean his bitcoins, the mixer would then interleave his transactions with other random ones and he would get clean crypto on a new wallet with no connection to his old one, but EVERY single transaction the mixer does with his coins would be tainted (?) so in effect it would give him his clean btc but screw the mixer's other customers

What if he also spread 100btc among random active wallets of coinbase users, would coinbase ban thousands of users? take their "tainted" crypto?

It still leaves a trail that could be subpoenaed.

How would that bother you? Could they trace you with that information? I don't know about that to be sure. If you operate a grey crypto market your already with one foot in a US jail.

Is trading on IRC illegal? Everyone used to do that and I wouldn't call that "grey."

If they truly are interested in finding him it's straightforward and within their power, just a bit tedious.

I thought there we're markets that are only accessible through vpns or on the darknet.

Anything you can get to via a normal VPN isn't secret, those just help you get around local firewalls.

As for exchanges on TOR: maybe? I haven't heard of any and IRC was rough and expensive enough. Exchanging bitcoin on TOR sounds like a great way to loose all of it.

I'd be surprised if he doesn't have enough money converted to cash already.

But sure, if he touches those wallets now, he will possibly leave a paper trail. Let's hope, for the victims' sake, that he does.