Australian drug raid officers seize $350,000 in Cryptocurrency | Hacker News Reader

Australian drug raid officers seize $350,000 in Cryptocurrency

zycrypto.com

49 pointstheweb138 comments

> There they found “cocaine, computers, mobile phones, a diamond ring, $70,000 cash and $350,000 worth of cryptocurrency“.

Yet the headline and article largely ignore the other stuff found in the guy’s home and for some reason focus on the cryptocurrency. I guess it draws more eyeballs than “cops find a bunch of valuable stuff in drug raid.”

“cocaine, computers, mobile phones, a diamond ring, $70,000 cash"

From this description, it sounds like the person works for a Big 4 bank.

Funny you should say that - the itnews article finishes with:

NSW Police said that a second search warrant was also executed "at a financial institution in the city and documents were seized", though no further details were provided.

Well, have you seen the submission domain?

> ZyCrypto is a Cryptocurrency news Breaking and Information Website Focusing On Daily News, Coins Analysis, Reviews and so much more.

I am sure other news sources would have reported this differently.

Update: itnews.com.au actually also highlighted cryptocurrency, but they also mentioned that arrest was made with a help of "state crime command’s cybercrime squad". I'd think that that cybercrime squad wanted to show off something only they can do.

Are people even bothered by the news that someone had drugs? It is not like the 90s, everyone has moved on and accepted that some people do drugs. Those raids only piss people off about how their tax money is being wasted. People get burglarized and police say there is no time to investigate and then you read that after months of operation police raided a home and found some weed. This is just not on.

This isn't a possession case, though - the charges are all about importing and supplying commercial quantities.

It makes no difference. They won't break the supply by raiding someone. Immediately someone else will take over.

Then start supporting political candidates who champion civil liberties because the two major parties are both responsible for letting this outcome become reality.

I'm not a fan of crypto$, but it is out of the control of the State. I can imagine a campaign to delegitimize crypto$ by raw association with the underworld.

Crypto seems to be doing a fine job of that on it's own, by ACTUAL association with the underworld/fruadsters/exit scammers.

and investment banks, but to be fair they are probably also included in the groups you mentioned.

This is basically an "I don't know why anybody's surprised" reply. The point is popularizing the connection, not establishing it, which as you point out already exists.

I wonder if this means they actually moved the money to wallets under their control, or if they just took control of the private keys.

No, it likely means that the cops took some monitors and hard drives and declared that they now have the cryptocurrency.

Agent Ray: "Good news, sir, we've got an uncorrupted hard drive."

Richard Gill: "In English, please."

Agent Ray: "It means we've got access to all of his files."

Close enough.

>moved the money to wallets under their control

reminded about that story recently when a Russian anti-corruption police officer was arrested with $123M found at his apartment (looks like he worked from home a lot :). Money were seized and moved to something like FSB storage (the arrest is part of the turf fight between FSB and Internal Affairs Ministry and that round went to FSB) and later the money were shipped to Savings Bank of Russia (controlled by government) - as a result $3M were lost somewhere.

They'd have to be pretty dumb to only take control of the private keys, since this means another person with the keys could still slip away with the money at any time.

"Taking control of a piece of information [from someone else]" is mostly a misnomer/paradox, unless you have a way to identify and destroy all co-owners of that information.

identifying and destroying all co-owners of certain information

Not a bad plot for a movie. Reminds me of Sync https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhjimhX9d5U

HAHA, they’ll never get my crypto! Cops seize crypto. Cops sell crypto.i don’t really understand how this keeps happening.

Mainstream media article

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp.smh.com.au/national/nsw/...

The amazing thing about this is that cryptography could not be used (or was simply neglected) in order to secure cryptocurrency.

People did not take care to lock their cryptographically secure currency behind strong encryption, to preclude awareness of the belongings at all or siezure thereof.

It's not completely trivial to secure crypto against government confiscation, without adding risk of accidental loss from hardware failure or forgetting something.

they must have been dumb to keep the only copy of the keys on a hard drive. should have committed the 12 words to memory or put it on an encrypted google drive or something

> should have committed the 12 words to memory or put it on an encrypted google drive

This is a stupid strategy to rely on if you've just been arrested.

That's a good guess at the passphrase… but it's thirteen words not twelve :-)

13?

https://brainwallet.io?12#random

Didn't even have full disk encryption? Or if they did, how was it compromised?

I'm guessing that means his storage wallet wasn't BIP38 encrypted. There's a lesson there, even if we are learning it from a drug dealer.

Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if cryptolocker or it's ilk will look for bitcoin (etc.) private keys while it's doing it's evil stuff from your PC. So physical access is not a requirement. To some extent one should assume everything on your PC could be accessed by a criminal (like your house... which is why people buy safes)

Please update the headline, it's $450,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

[edit] $330,000

I'm trying to decide if you're joking, or if the cryptocurrency is really that volatile. That I have to ask is... worrying.

He's joking. As of now, the police haven't reported which cryptocurrency was seized or how much. The police have only stated that "$350,000 worth of cryptocurrency" was seized.

350,000 Australian Dollars is only worth around 266,000 US Dollars but the article isn't clear about the specifics of either the cryptocurrency or the fiat.

Its worth about $332k now.

It's actually only half a crypto coin.

...It's unusual to me that Australians do police.

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