but it not clear, see this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35548508
that's where case law comes in, probably there's some test for it made up by a few judges (like was there an active warrant, or named as person of interest in an active case, etc..)
Bitcoin is not a cipher it's the whole system so it is valid to say a weakness in bitcoin was used to find the person.
How are you supposed to turn fraudulently obtained btc into dollars without doing that?
Not at once
He was doing it over 6 years no problem
You don’t need a billion, you need a few million and he got that and it wasn’t even part of the investigation or why he got caught
That’s the neat thing… You don’t.
For example, if you were some random cryptobro buying personal quantities of drugs in 2015 there’s some risk but the FBI probably isn’t going to spend time on something that small. If you do anything which reveals funds going to or from a tumbler, however, the risk isn’t just KYC but also questions like who else used that tumbler - if you were participating at the same time the North Koreans or a big ransomware ring were laundering something, that traffic might be a lot more likely to get analyzed and in the worst case scenario some agents show up trying to get you to convince them that you were unwitting small fry and not hiding more. Lying to them is a federal crime, too, so even if you nothing other than tumble coins for ideological reasons you’d want to be very careful about what you say – and think about how hard it could be to prove you didn’t know the other parties in a transaction.
You're referring to the risk of getting chased down for the "bad deeds" of others after funds are co-mingled. You're not explaining that it's prohibitively risky or not possible.
Further, I'm only aware of tumbling blacklisting [0], where the exchange gets blacklisted for co-mingling known dirty funds. AFAIK, there are still sizable tumbling vectors.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/08/crypto-mixing-service-tornad...
They have to prove you committed a crime, all you need to do is have a lawyer present during questioning.
That's a good idea, but any decent lawyer will tell you to keep your mouth shut. Especially when being questioned. Let the lawyer do the talking[0].
[0] That assumes you have a good lawyer. Which may or may not be a valid assumption.
This is true. However, I'd present a few caveats:
1. Even though it's a felony to lie to Federal (and some state/local) law enforcement in the US, you can just not speak to them. In fact, you should mostly not talk to the police under any circumstances. There are many reasons for this. Too many for me to list here. However, this attorney and a former police officer[0] (48 minute video, but well worth it. Share it with your friends and family too!) provide all those reasons.
2. Law enforcement aren't superhuman. They're just as dumb (or smart, but the really smart ones end up in corner offices rather than police stations like police and more common criminals) as the next guy. Their big advantage, especially in a circumstance like this, is that they only have to get it right (i.e., find some evidence) once. The alleged perpetrator of a crime needs to get it right (in covering their tracks, destroying evidence, etc.) every single time to make sure they aren't identified and caught.
So, unless you're prepared to cover your tracks (in this case, it was bitcoin transactions) over and over forever, you run the risk of being caught -- eventually.
I'll say it again, because it's an important point: If you're in the US (not just a citizen, anyone present within its borders), DON'T TALK TO THE POLICE!
I'm sure things are different elsewhere (perhaps someone could expound on that?), but in the US, just STFU.
This is really the main thing I was thinking about: it’s been bizarre how the salespeople kept going on about bitcoin being anonymous when it’s more like “if you do everything perfectly, you probably won’t be tracked. As far as we know now.”, which is just incredibly fragile.
> running into a sting
This was the basis of Operation Dark Gold. They had a ton of other evidence against the people they rounded up, I think it just helped them find targets. Receiving cash in the mail is not illegal.
We're talking about 1e9 orders of magnitude, here. I'll take that fraction.
Nothing about this article suggests any breakthrough in investigative capabilities, it’s pretty embarrassing actually
The government got lucky that someone was trying to get rid of something they found to be a burden in their lives
I don’t think they did; if the BCH transaction was in 2017 was the subject of fraud, it was within the statute of limitations when he was publicly charged.
> I am guessing his attempts at laundering the money and spending, reset the clock.
They didn’t “reset the clock” on the fraud involved in obtaining the bitcoin initially, but they were likely generally, on their own, fraudulent transactions.
Apparently he didn't voluntarily give away he's secrets, they were found around his place.
I wonder how the feds bypassed the statute of limitations on this. He was not identified until almost a decade after the theft. I am guessing his attempts at laundering the money and spending, reset the clock.