Court Orders UK Man to Pay $571m for Operating Fraudulent Bitcoin Trading Scheme
cftc.gov
cftc.gov
One of my in-laws is a serial MLM patsy and has totally fallen for one of these. Both AI and cryptocurrency are in the news a lot, making it easy for con-artists to dazzle people with marketing techno-babble and promises of guaranteed riches. (Obviously not all trading schemes are complete cons, but so many are.)
investment banking is a real job
That is to say, real players aren't soliciting investments from retail.
> Federal Court Orders Man to Pay $572 Million
> Reynolds solicited at least 22,190 bitcoin
Looks like crime does pay – pays around $713 Million. Not a bad return for around 6 months of work.
It only pays because BTCUSD shot up since the crime was committed.
It could have gone the other way and the scammer would owe way more than he stole at the time.
At any rate, I doubt this guy's asset are within reach of either government (UK or US) unless the throw him in a cage until he regurgitates his private keys.
In the UK it's a crime to not disclose keys or passwords to the police, even if it's only for investigatory purposes. So they could have done this before it even went to trial. Presumably they could do it now under the pretext of investigating the UK victims of the scam.
But I believe the maximum sentence is two years, whether through the key disclosure law, or general contempt of court. I'd do 2 years for $713 million. I think almost everyone would.
Heck, I've already done 10 years with my current employer for far less.
Makes me happy I don't live there. At the very least, it saves me from having to resort to steganography and/or claiming amnesia.
Also: he's already committed a larger crime, so who cares.
Then, since you are required to pay restitution, once one Satoshi of those coins moves, on the public blockchain, you're in hot water again.
Basically, you'd be doing 2 x [X wallets] years, to be able to look at your blockchain addresses holding all that BTC and never touch them. Unless, you'd previously moved some to an address that was never never-transacted-with and never detected.
What do you think happens when you wilfully violate a court order?
At best, he will have to avoid touching those assets to avoid being detected. They’re tainted on a public ledger.
You exchange a couple of years for $700 million and move to Thailand?
Couldn't have put it better.
They're tainted in the UK, a small and foggy island lost somewhere in the north atlantic.
Against 700+ MUSD, that doesn't carry much weight.
Also, isn't there some sort of double-jeopardy rule in the UK?
Am I the only one who is somehow surprised and annoyed that Bitcoin has its own unicode character?
And anyone Klingon is declared for use in the private use area, like other niche languages.
The other day I wanted to share a windows keyboard shortcut and thought it would be nice to use the windows logo to represent the key but was surprised it didn't exist like the Mac CMD one does... :\ At least it's been around longer....
Source?
Also, advice, if I may: use limit orders, you're trading in a bot ecosystem, market orders are rarely a good idea.
You can always just call an OTC broker and the spread is typically 0.3-0.5%
Will the complex have $100 billion in money waiting to buy up Bitcoin once there's such an event, or has the mantra of "HODL" worked and enough will hold to allow enough institutional money to slowly be moved in (by small handful of decision makers who's gains aren't usually well aligned with who owns the money)?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/tesla-buys-1point5-billion-i...
That is a valueless statement.
You have no idea of what the actual supply/demand and liquidity for BTC actually is.
Even if you were to aggregate all the order books of all the existing exchanges, you'd still have no idea because of the number of deals that happen OTC.
That is a... robust amount of damages. OTOH:
> The CFTC cautions victims that restitution orders may not result in the recovery of any money lost because the wrongdoers may not have sufficient funds or assets.
Even in the days before crypto, scammers could hide money in other ways. They need to catch him.
No. But he will have effectively given up all his known wallets. If he touches them, he’ll have lit himself up.
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.
What if he also spread 100btc among random active wallets of coinbase users, would coinbase ban thousands of users? take their "tainted" crypto?
If they truly are interested in finding him it's straightforward and within their power, just a bit tedious.
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.
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.
They are so formulaic and obvious, but people go blind with greed.
I hope all the scammers eventually suffer one way or another, but I worry that there are so many that many of them will slip by.
Hey folks, remember that there is no AI behind trading that a youtuber can master. If there is, they would definitely not share with you. Please stop losing your hard earned money to shit scams.