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from the convert-it-to-libra-coin-if-course dept.
The bitcoin scam worked — almost too well. In 2012, back when almost no one had heard of the digital coin, he’d started modestly, asking people he found on the dark web for $200 or $300 worth of bitcoin as a way to test out his investment scheme. He told them he could exploit the then huge price differences between various bitcoin exchanges and promised huge rewards. But once they sent the funds, he vanished into the ether to find his next stooge.
There was a certain genius criminal irony to it: He would hype an untraceable anonymous digital currency, then get paid in it.
[...] But he had a problem. It was getting harder to turn the most overhyped currency since the tulip into actual cash.
[...] All of this means that people like our guy who are very rich on paper (or, more accurately, on the blockchain) must devise highly complex methods to convert their ill-gotten gains, or risk losing quite a bit of value, said Tom Robinson, co-founder of the blockchain analytics company Elliptic. “Funds from illicit activities are just lying dormant, and they are waiting to find effective means of cashing out,” he said.
Yet if we know anything about criminals, it’s that they’re resourceful. As financial institutions and regulators the world over grapple with bitcoin’s adaptation to mainstream use, some of these criminals have devised ingenious hacks for converting their money; still others are turning to alternative coins as they seek greater privacy for their transactions and to stay ahead of the law.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:54AM (1 child)
But just look at the time-stamp!
Who is publishing to Vice at that early hour, a year and a half ago? And to think, we could have had a much more topical and up-to-date aristarchus submission!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:53PM
Actually, what's really interesting is that according to my tracking of BTC on Coinbase, it slumped in November of 2018 and was still in slump at the time of this story (final base of the December 2017 crash. Within a couple of weeks of this (March 30) Bitcoin started climbing again, been making steady gains (for Bitcoin), and it's reached (very roughly) half of the value of the December 2017 peak.
Very interesting timing that such a story would come right before it started rising again. Maybe the bad guys started figuring it out, or managed to liquidate out of Bitcoin to something else leaving the skilled illegitimate traders in the game -or maybe they even found greener pastures by and large. Or maybe a new rise of ill-gotten booty (or ill-botted goonies) came to be.
This sig for rent.