Man used Coinbase to pay hitman in Bitcoin for wife's murder, FBI says
decrypt.co
decrypt.co
Your last-mile exchange from bitcoin back to USD on Coinbase, for example, is logged and monitored by Coinbase -- furthermore, the bank is incentivized to file Suspicious Activity Reports whenever they see these large wire transfers to the virtual banks used by the exchanges for withdrawing and depositing fiat. So, even privacy coins are tracked in this way (these necessary fiat exchanges).
You can basically say the same thing about IRS tracking crypto tax evaders.
Some ground-laying patents have been filed by CipherTrace, but I think it speaks for itself that the IRS's $625,000.00 bounty on tracing Monero still stands.
Wouldn't that be enough for him to be able to say "no i just bought some weed sorry, jail me for a month. i dont know why that person then went on to try to kill my wife."?
Who would believe that story?
Seems like they'd need to seize the hitman's digital communications, at which point the jig is probably already up.
A grand jury must look through the evidence and conclude that there is enough there to possibly result in a conviction.
Even if you escape the statute of limitations, there is a good chance your grandchildren will be able to see what you did with Bitcoin by just looking it up on a public website in half a century.
IMO, the only "surefire" way to launder bitcoin is traditional money laundering: send a trusted person dirty bitcoins and they send you back bitcoins from a clean legitimate source. Strong incentive for launderer to take the funds and run, so trust is unstable in this model.
That's all of the internet, forget blockchains.
Even if you are talking about dragnet collection and you assume that for example NSA can store all traffic on the internet (which is basically impossible) in Utah (or wherever) for future decryption with post-quantum cryptography there is no reason to believe that they would make it public. And that is basically the worst case scenario.
Privacy fatalism helps no-one.
Reddit is not unique. People do this with Twitter too. I forget the name but there's an entire service for caching changes to your Twitter bio.
> No, it isn't, if a service is properly secured and does not sell it's data then there is no reason to think this
Citation needed. Reddit and Twitter aren't selling data to those people. It's an open API.
We may be talking about different things, but to me "all of the internet" means much more than public data and public forums.
I think privacy is something we should strive for, but I think that when something is said publically on a globally broadcasted medium people cannot reasonably have an expectation of privacy. The problem with privacy in my mind is when there can reasonably be an expectation of privacy but that isn't met.
If I tweet something it's clear that's public. If I DM someone that should be private.
Why is it reasonable to not expect that there would be someone saving public data?
Facebook had created puppet profiles from people's contact information and made them public, notoriously.
Like, at what point would you like to accept that GPs statement is not hyperbole? Would all information that was private need to go public? By then I'd say it is too late.
This is a rather silly argument where you try to draw some line in online services that has been willfully greyed by the people who create these platforms for their own benefit.
If you want to call GP a privacy fatalist, then I'll just call you a privacy denialist and leave it there.
Is it so absurd to say that if I post stuff publically I cannot expect it to be private and if I post stuff privately I should absolutely be able to depend on it to be private?
I think your example of parler is an example of a service that was not adequately secured to protect it's private communications and the facebook example is clearly unethical and just one of the reasons I don't use the service.
We can only speculate that data breaches will be used for such purposes eventually too.
The best you can get is E2EE communications. I find it ironic someone commenting on a text based public forum would argue this.
> The best you can get is E2EE communications.
There are quite a lot of steps between public data and E2EE.
> I find it ironic someone commenting on a text based public forum would argue this.
I don't have any expectation of privacy here and know what I'm saying is public. On other sites/services I have privacy and know that what I'm saying isn't public.
"Everything stays on the internet forever" is a good cautionary principle, but isn't a strict reality.
Is this why we've successfully caught every single ransomware operation transacting in crypto?
Humm. I suppose that there aren't very many of them. Perhaps cryptocurrencies do make some forms of criminal enterprises much easier to operate. I'm willing to accept that 'Hitman for hire' might not be one of them, though - mostly because you need a local presence, at which point, taking payment in cash has a number of advantages.
It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
It's not impossible to use the regular banking system for crime. But it's a lot harder, and a lot easier to get caught. A cartel in Mexico with an annual income in billions might be able to bribe or threaten the right people, but some techie running a small call center is going to have a harder time.
You still need to be local to perform the assassination, but the time and location are still vague. It's basically "somewhere the person will be at some point in the future". Makes it a lot harder to stage a sting because you can't have people set up everywhere that person will be at all times.
We're also not terribly far away from remote assassinations being possible. There was an assassination in Iran that allegedly used a computer to control a machine gun to kill someone. Combine that with a self-driving car, or a remotely operated car, and you've got a hitman mobile. Or the cheap and low-tech route, strapping explosives to drones. The cartels have already started using them, so it's not improbable that you could pilot one across the world. Pay the cartel to set up a drone and give you the credentials to control it and you don't even have to leave your home.
> It would be quite difficult to operate a ransomware operation out of, say, Belarus if you expected your victims to pay by posting you envelopes stuffed with cash.
I don't think that's really true. At the scale of money we're talking about, hiring a courier to handcuff the money to their wrist and fly across the world wouldn't be an excessive cost. The primary downside is the same; there's a known location where the money will be left and picked up.
From TFA "The FBI has not, however, been able to identify the hitman as yet. The reason is almost certainly because the hitman did not use a commercial service like Coinbase, which must comply with know-your-customer laws, for the Bitcoin transactions but instead relied on his own personal wallet—one that did not reveal any information about his identity."
(not implying that the bbc gave him any money)
If they try to convert to fiat via an exchange, they can be identified the same way the husband was. If they try to buy products directly without using fiat then it is harder for law enforcement to get the records they need, but still quite possible.
They will probably be safe if they never touch the bitcoin, but that entirely defeats the purpose of using it
An asumption you're making and likely untrue. There are many ways to convert to fiat or skip that step and luander through the dark web
Usually, one'd use a coin like Monero instead, the project's wretched history notwithstanding.
I can see a lot of value in it though, just like how I see value in Freenet, I2P, Tor and other such overlay networks.
It certainly can be safe and pseudo anonymous. Just need to be careful about fiat on/off ramps and maybe use a mixer or two. These things are not hard to do.
The person who used Coinbase was either lazy or ignorant
Why do you think ransomware groups always accept bitcoin?
https://www.chainalysis.com/ (no affiliation)
there are services that will "mix" your coins with a bunch of other people's, but you can see all the coins that went into the service and the addresses they were all sent to so it's not foolproof.
I've heard that monero is a coin that can be used for laundering, but I've never looked into it so I can't say for sure
Think about it: If you were a criminal, would you rather keep your cash under a proverbial mattress like in the old days, or in properties that could be seized by the local government? Or in BTC, where it can't really be seized, is semi-anonymous, and where there is a (imperfect but decent) exchange market for fiat currency (and, rarely, goods and services) when you need it?
I know what I would choose.
The main reason behind the rise in price is purely speculation and fomo.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/547280-gaetz-paid-accused...
Yes; I realize the dystopian possibilities. But if we trust law enforcement, and we believe that the laws are and will always be just, then we should want to help them.
Either way, it’s already happening in secret. The question is really whether it should happen in the open.
The heck?
Looks like this scheme finally applied to bitcoin. It was very easy to predict though.
Would it be smarter as a murderer-for-hire to ask to be paid in a less-expensive (for now) but growing currency such as Etherium or Litecoin? I mean, ask the 'client' for X dollars worth of that coin and then let it appreciate over time. Maybe that's missing the mark. But I sort of feel like you'd be better off going for the long term gains and, potentially at least, being able to cash out earlier?
The Wikipedia page has more info on "contract killing", won't put you on a list to just read that :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing
Since this murder-for-hire chose to use a global and transparent ledger that will have that transaction until either the world disappears or the ledger somehow disappears from all nodes, I don't think "smarter" should come anywhere near this. Using blockchains like Bitcoin for crime is far beyond stupid.
What would it take for the Bitcoin blockchain to atrophy enough so as to be unusable?
No, because the efficient market hypothesis.
If you know that some asset is definitely going to significantly appreciate in value why don't you just buy it and skip out the hitman thing? The answer is that almost noone has any better idea of what the correct price should be than whatever the current price is.
A hitman may wish to delay use of payment for opsec reasons, but I think it's odd to think their desire for speculative risk would be much different than the general public.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/wwmt.com/amp/news/local/former-...