• Second largest bitcoin confiscation in US history
• Silk Road as theft victim
• Detection of crypto crimes
It is said to be the second largest bitcoin confiscation in US history: the US Attorney’s office seized more than 50,000 bitcoins that were found during a house search in Georgia – they were stolen ten years ago. The perpetrator confesses.
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Theft from Silk Road
At the time of the seizure, in November 2021, the stolen property was valued at $3.36 billion. With today’s Bitcoin price, the value is now just under a billion US dollars. The theft itself, however, is much further in the past: In 2012, the accused James Zhon stole the huge amount of bitcoins from the Silk Road trading platform, which was active on the Darknet from 2011 to 2013, as the US Department of Justice explains in a statement. He probably used a weakness in the platform’s payment system to capture the cryptocurrency. He initiated a total of 140 transactions via nine accounts intended to disguise his identity. As a result, over 50,000 Bitcoin were transferred to him. Within a short time he credited his accounts with several bitcoins and withdrawn them again within a second, so that no debits could be checked due to a system error. Investigators eventually found a single-board computer containing the bitcoins in an underground floor vault inside a blanket-wrapped popcorn can. Silk Road was a well-known marketplace for buying and selling drugs and illegal goods. In 2015, Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Success in uncovering crypto crimes
Damian Williams of the New York Southern District Attorney’s Office said he was encouraged. It was possible to track down and secure an “impressive amount of proceeds from crime” using modern methods for tracking down cryptocurrencies and practiced, old-fashioned police work, according to Spiegel Netzwelt. The investigators described Zhon’s approach as a sophisticated system. Until earlier this year, the crypto seizure was considered the largest in US history, but was surpassed in February when authorities seized nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen in a 2016 hack at cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. At the time of the seizure earlier this year, the bitcoins were valued at $3.6 billion. The couple responsible for the theft were caught trying to launder the bitcoins and face charges of conspiracy and money laundering in court.
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