and then I see poeple defending btc price action being legit
if this guy was able to do that, in a company that is part of nasdaq, has sec watching it and so on, imagine whats happening on binance and all those others offshore/shady exchanges
The guy was caught in short order so he really wasn't able to do it. You can steal money pretty easily in the traditional financial system with a simple forged check. Money will likely go through initially but you also will likely be caught in short order.
My point is, coinbase still allowed 154millions USD to be washed on it's exchange. By a random guy who clearly didnt even bother cover his back, imagine what actual organized crime is doing with offshores exchanges.
KYC isn't meant to prevent money from moving at all, it's meant to enable tracing of the money.
Just the fact that he was in tokyo (japan), instead of a non US aligned country, such as Russia or China, that he had his private keys easy accesible and that he stayed in BTC instead of going for another crypto more anon friendly, says a lot of the stupid nature of this "criminal"
But once again, my whole point is, coinbase allowed a random person to deposit 154 millions USD and withdraw 3.8k btc with absolutely no problems? and in a quickly way, according to the original article
I think its safe to assume that the banks said, okay the money went to coinbase, and coinbase just said yeah about that, he used the money to buy BTC and withdrew it to this wallet and thats about it
the guy was located cause he didnt even try to hide himself, the rest is history.
my point remains, if this, that was a such dumb crime, managed to convert the stolen funds into BTC using coinbase with absolutely no problems, then its easy to assume that real and strong money going to biggest offshores exchanges is from illicit sources.
I don't get why that was not an option.
Coinbase does not serve PRC citizens or Russians (see https://www.coinbase.com/places). Exactly so that any money laundering can be caught by US government.
Don’t put words in a mouth that never said it.
And as a person (citizen), yes. As a business, one doesn’t care if bread or guns they make help potential criminals to live or murder. If you don’t ask your customers if they are “bad guys who have all the paperwork but still stolen this money” at the doorstep, don’t blame others. Regulations are there for you to not trouble your head about it, just follow them.
Why are you stating this as if it an unquestionable fact? It sure as hell isn't.
To go into more detail, claims like "he was only barely caught" shadow the possibilities of him being caught later, which never had a chance to be realized. i.e. it may appear that he was caught randomly but we owe it to truth to at least dig into what would have happened if that had failed - and that likely requires a domain expert to know the actual security measures in place.
A single person controlled the transfer instructions via email for a $150M insurance transfer.
By falsifying the email instructions for the fiat transfer $150M was sent directly to his personal account (no red flags there).
Then he was able to transfer $150M from his personal account to coinbase (no red flags there).
Why is your focus on the coinbase conversion from fiat to Bitcoin?
This does not happen in crypto.
Despite all the deflection, law enforcement was able to recover the Bitcoin. Contrary to your point law enforcement and regulators alike have successfully brought legal actions (civil) and prosecutions (criminal) in the blockchain space just as they have against traditional institutions.
The insurance company, banks, and coinbase are all to happy cryptocurrency was involved at some point so they can do some magic hand waving, and blame cryptocurrency. I would ask why bother, but obviously it’s a successful PR campaign to excuse their own ineptitude.
This is a downright lie, I’m not sure why people keep repeating it. Doesn’t stand to the least bit of scrutiny, BEC schemes are stealing billions and billions via the traditional financial system. Once that money gets sent overseas, nothing is easy.
[0] -https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21165768-us_vs_rei_i...
It's also that multiplying the current price by the number of coins just doesn't mean anything. The resulting number doesn't represent anything real.
It is also true for any regular stock. “Market cap” is just an indicator value of a stock at a given time, not the value, and no one expects all of it to be sold at that sum, because of market dynamics. The resulting number doesn't represent anything real regardless of the asset class. The only difference between crypto and some stock market traded company shares is that the latter has usually a known non-zero value at the assets level, everything else is just a thin air of trust and expectations. You may see cryptohead-ance as crypto’s base assets.
The market cap of crypto doesn't even indicate anything. "Buying every bitcoin" doesn't mean anything. There's no value in doing so, unlike buying an entire company.
I think you err in this part. It doesn’t mean anything to you, if you’d buy that. Well, buying all of rice doesn’t mean anything to me (I can’t eat it for unrelated reasons and have no other uses beyond that). But other people value some properties of crypto, in the same way they value e.g. Intel much more than its raw factory floors and assets. Nobody would buy crypto if they thought it is worthless. But they have thought otherwise. They bought it at 0.00001, at 0.1, at 100 and at 60000 USD. You are basically saying that you don’t need crypto, even all of it for zero money. Well, this is a personal choice, not something one has to argue with or prove to others. People define value by supply and demand. Market cap is an aggregate indicator of their supply/demand equilibrium times the circulation volume.
If you buy every bitcoin, you have nothing. I don't meant that in the sense that bitcoin isn't backed by anything, I mean that in the sense that bitcoin is only meaningful when it is traded between people. If you buy every single bitcoin, bitcoin is dead. It is a nonsensical thing to do. Trying to figure out the price for which it can be done is nonsense, as well.
That’s not really a compelling story.
The only thing that was mine on the check was the account number.
Yet the check sailed through and was honored and my account debited.
The bank insisted this was all my fault. The bank insisted they couldn't do anything about it. The bank insisted I call this number, which simply gave me more runaround. So I decided to camp out in the branch manager's office, until they gave up and refunded me the lost money.
The cake topper on all this is they then tried to sell me expensive check "security" paper.
What a sick joke.
What was surprising to me, is that my legacy account# were still in the system (My bank was bought and then bought... 4 times.. over the years).
Good you got your money back m
In this case, the wallet was emptied.
The traditional similar thing would be the bank account that is emptied.
A forged check would not be sufficient at all. Even for 0,05% of the amount stolen here and it would only be where checks are valid ( would be worthless outside the US)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
"Thirty-five fraudulent instructions were issued by security hackers via the SWIFT network to illegally transfer close to US$1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York account belonging to Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of Bangladesh. Five of the thirty-five fraudulent instructions were successful in transferring US$101 million, with US$20 million traced to Sri Lanka and US$81 million to the Philippines. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked the remaining thirty transactions, amounting to US$850 million, due to suspicions raised by a misspelled instruction.[2] All the money transferred to Sri Lanka has since been recovered. However, as of 2018 only around US$18 million of the US$81 million transferred to the Philippines has been recovered.[3] Most of the money transferred to the Philippines went to four personal accounts, held by single individuals, and not to companies or corporations"
and then they point to the user experience of how banks at least pretend like the money was returned, which is convenient for the user, something that is also possible to do with using an optional bank custodying crypto deposits.
My comment was not intended to promote the idea that the existing financial system is comparable in the frauds and crimes that happen, just that it's an overstatement to say people never steal millions in an irreversible way.
He opened up the account in the employer's name, submitted notarized documents, etc.
The difference in this case is that he allegedly wasn't authorized, which means he's going to jail. But how is the bank supposed to know that?
Do you honestly think being part of the nasdaq is a sign of legitimacy?